Entry Type: Thing - Starting with H

Hindman Hall Museum

Hindman Hall Museum is a single-story structure made out of precast concrete (rather than concrete cast on site). Completed in 1965, it contains a visitor’s center and museum for the Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 15, 2020. In 1961, the estate of the late Biscoe Hindman, son of Confederate General Thomas C. Hindman, bequeathed the Prairie Grove Battlefield Park with a $100,000 grant for creating some sort of memorial for General Hindman at the park. As the collection of Civil War artifacts grew at the Prairie Grove Battlefield Park Museum, additional space was needed. By 1963, the Prairie Grove Battlefield Park Commission had decided that the grant would …

Historic Dyess Colony: Boyhood Home of Johnny Cash

aka: Johnny Cash Boyhood Home
When the Historic Dyess Colony: Boyhood Home of Johnny Cash opened in 2014, it became the fourth heritage site established by Arkansas State University (ASU) to preserve the history and culture of eastern Arkansas. The site consists of two main structures in Dyess (Mississippi County): the Dyess Administration Building, located at 110 Center Drive, and the Boyhood Home of Johnny Cash, located at 4791 W. County Road 924. The museum allows visitors to explore the construction of one of America’s first and largest New Deal agricultural resettlement colonies, see what it was like to live in the colony, and learn how colony life influenced and helped shape legendary musician Johnny Cash as well as music promoter Gene Williams. The white, …

Historic Preservation

Arkansas has an active preservation community with a notable success record in saving buildings, sites, and neighborhoods. The tools successfully used in Arkansas were developed on the national stage and successfully transplanted to the state. The first preservation achievements were the result of strong individual leadership focused on saving landmark buildings. The first major success was what is now called the Old State House (Arkansas’s first state capitol building), which was constructed beginning in 1833. It remained the capitol until 1911, when construction of the present Arkansas State Capitol was sufficiently completed for occupancy. Since 1901, the legislature and the governor had debated the idea of selling the old building once it was vacated. This proposal garnered serious attention again …

Historical Archaeology

Archaeologists do more than study the ancient remains of Native Americans; they are also interested in the lives of the explorers, colonists, settlers, and their descendants who contributed to the more recent history of America. Even during periods when written records were kept, not everything about the past was recorded. The details of everyday life often are neglected in historical accounts, but archaeologists believe that these details contribute to a fuller understanding of the past. This more recently developed field of archaeological study is called historical archaeology, and perhaps its greatest strength is its partnership with other fields of study, including history, archival documentation, architectural studies, and folklore. When combined, these different approaches provide a richer and more complex understanding …

History of Hot Springs Gambling Museum

The History of Hot Springs Gambling Museum located at 3339-C Central Avenue in Hot Springs (Garland County) preserves, restores, and displays gambling memorabilia from Hot Springs’ rich gambling history. In particular, the museum covers early twentieth-century gambling in Hot Springs. The museum was established in 2016 as a partnership between two Hot Springs gambling history collectors, Lanny Beavers and Chris Hendrix, to display their collection for public viewing. The museum features a vast collection of items from notable Hot Springs venues such as the Vapors, the Southern Club, the Belvedere Club, Oaklawn Park, and the Essex Park Racetrack. The collection holds eighty functional slot machines, fifteen of which were used in Hot Springs, in addition to ten gaming tables among …

Hodges House

The Hodges House is located on Arkansas Highway 7 in Bismarck (Hot Spring County). Constructed in 1907 in the folk Victorian style, the home was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 2, 1995. The home was constructed by Dr. Lee Bray and his wife, Clara. The couple lived in the home until 1925, when Dr. Thomas Hodges and Charlotte Hodges bought the house. It appears that the Hodgeses bought the Brays’ medical practice. Thomas Hodges was born in Kentucky in 1868 and grew up in Missouri. After medical school, he established a medical practice in the state and married Charlotte Mikulus in 1925. The couple moved to Bismarck shortly after the wedding. Thomas worked as a …

Hodges v. United States

Hodges v. United States, 203 U.S. 1 (1906) is a U.S. Supreme Court case resulting in the overturning of the convictions of three white men convicted in 1903 of conspiring to prevent a group of African-American workers from holding jobs in a lumber mill in Whitehall (Poinsett County), a small town in northeastern Arkansas. It was overruled by another Supreme Court decision in 1968, but the decision in Hodges represented an important step in the evolving judicial interpretation of the constitutional amendments passed in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Court’s decision imposed a strict limitation on the application of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime), as well …

Home Ice Company

The Home Ice Company building, once located at 700 Cate Avenue in Jonesboro (Craighead County), was an early twentieth-century industrial structure that was associated with various industries. The building was first home to a wagon factory, then a peanut processing plant, then an ice cream manufacturing facility, and finally an ice plant. The businesses occupying the building over the years provided jobs and products for the local community and for communities abroad. In June 2017, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places; it was announced the next month that the building would be demolished. Around 1910, the Jonesboro Wagon Manufacturing Company, the only maker of farm wagons in Jonesboro, constructed a new two-story exterior brick structure, …

Home News (McCrory)

Walter Wilson Raney, an enterprising newspaper publisher, is credited with helping shape McCrory (Woodruff County) into a business center. Raney founded the Home News in McCrory in 1915, establishing the News as a Democratic paper published on Fridays. Raney printed on the masthead that the paper was “edited in the interest of McCrory and Woodruff County” and wrote in the first issue that citizens had solicited him to “give us a home paper.” In 1918, for printing the News, Raney installed the first and only typesetting machine in the county. Raney had begun his newspaper career in the printing office of the Woodruff County News (1901–1910), run by Gustave W. Kramer. After working for the Woodruff County News for two …

Homelessness

Large numbers of homeless people live in Arkansas. Looking at data for people who received a funded service, emergency shelter, or transitional shelter from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Arkansas Management Information System found that 22,000 people were homeless at some point during 2006 in Arkansas. A statewide count on January 24, 2007, of people housed in shelters, along with an observational count on the streets and in camps, determined that 7,400 to 8,000 Arkansans are homeless on any given night. The Arkansas Homeless Coalition completed a survey in 2005 among the homeless who congregate under bridges and frequent the soup kitchens in the Little Rock (Pulaski County) area. One hundred survey responses documented that …

Homer

The Homer was a steamboat that plied the waters of the Ouachita River in the early 1860s. It achieved significance for its role in the Camden Expedition of 1864, when Union troops seized it, along with its cargo, and sunk it. Confederate soldiers later used its timbers to bridge the Ouachita. The Homer, built for $30,000 in Parkersburg, Virginia (now West Virginia), in 1859, went into service on November 14, 1859, at the Port of Cincinnati, Ohio. It was a 194-ton sidewheel packet measuring 148 feet long, twenty-eight feet wide, and five feet deep. Its co-owners were Levi Hopkins of Mason County, Virginia, and his father-in-law, stock dealer and farmer William H. Neale of Parkersburg. Neale and Hopkins sold the Homer …

Homestead Act of 1862

The Homestead Act of 1862 was a federal statute that regulated most federal transfers of land to Arkansans after the Civil War. It required two things of homesteaders: settlement and cultivation. In other words, homesteaders had to live on and farm their land, and, in exchange, they received land at a very low cost. These land transfers comprised more than eight million Arkansas acres, nearly a quarter of the state’s land, for nearly 75,000 applicants. Just about half (4,037,291 acres of 8,133,791 acres) was transferred in the twentieth century. As the railroads made more of Arkansas accessible, more and more Arkansans homesteaded land. In contrast to the Southern Homestead Act—which was in force during the Reconstruction years only from 1866 …

Hoo-Hoo Monument

The Hoo-Hoo Monument, built in 1909 and located in the southeastern corner of the Missouri Pacific Railroad Depot parking lot at North 1st and Main streets in Gurdon (Clark County), is a granite and bronze monument with Egyptian Revival detail, designed by artist George J. Zolnay. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 2, 1999. The International Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo, a fraternal group of lumbermen, was founded in 1892 in Gurdon in the Hotel Hall by Bolling Arthur Johnson and five other men. According to tradition, Johnson—a lumber trade journalist—had for some time seen a need to link together, or “concatenate,” the workers of the timber industry. In 1891, there were many local and …

Hookworm Eradication

Hookworm disease was a significant public health issue in Arkansas until the movement to eradicate hookworms in the early twentieth century. With official estimates claiming that up to twenty percent of the entire population of the state suffered from hookworm infestation, this parasite was sufficiently widespread to affect the economy as well as the health of Arkansas. Its virtual eradication was the result of a public health and education campaign on the part of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission between 1910 and 1914. The hookworm is an intestinal parasite that grows and reproduces in the intestines of its hosts. When infected people deposit feces containing hookworm eggs in warm, moist, shaded soil, the eggs hatch and develop into larvae. Within five …

Hope Girl Scout Little House

The Hope Girl Scout Little House, located near Jones Street in Fair Park in Hope (Hempstead County), is a one-and-a-half-story Rustic-style log building constructed between 1938 and 1939 with assistance from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a Depression-era federal relief program. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 27, 2015. The Girl Scout Little House movement had its origins in the 1923 Better Homes Demonstration Week when architect Donn Barber designed a house “for the American family of average size and moderate income” behind the White House in Washington DC for the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the Better Homes of America organization. After the June 1923 celebration, Lou Henry Hoover, wife of future …

Horace Estes House

The Horace Estes House is a Tudor Revival–style house constructed in Gurdon (Clark County) in 1934. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 21, 1993. The structure is unique in Gurdon, as it is the only Tudor-style structure in a town where most of the homes from the same period are devoid of any decoration and are constructed solely of locally sourced materials. Gurdon was a company town built around the timber industry and associated railroad industries, and the majority of structures in the community were constructed using local lumber. While a brick plant operated in Gurdon, homes constructed from brick in this period were uncommon, although not unheard of. The house is a wood-framed, …

Horace Mann School Historic District

The Horace Mann School Historic District at Norfork (Baxter County) is a complex of four buildings constructed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and National Youth Administration (NYA) during the Great Depression. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 29, 2007. The first school at Norfork was established in 1908, two years before the town was incorporated, but by the 1930s, the wood-frame school was no longer adequate for the area’s educational needs. The community turned to the WPA, one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies, for assistance. Construction of the Main School Building started in 1936 under the direction of WPA supervisor Tom Collier, with the federal agency supplying $18,564 and the community …

Hornibrook House

aka: Empress of Little Rock
The Hornibrook House, constructed in 1888, is one of the finest examples of ornate Victorian architecture in the state. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on July 30, 1974. In 1867, James H. Hornibrook and his wife, Margaret McCulley Hornibrook, moved from Toronto, Canada, to Little Rock (Pulaski County). Upon his arrival in Little Rock, Hornibrook entered a partnership with Miles Q. Townsend in a liquor sales and saloon business that flourished for twenty-two years. After Hornibrook’s financial success, he wished to build a home for his family that was worthy of his accomplishments. The lavish home took approximately seven years to construct. It was completed in 1888 at a reported cost of $20,000. Designed by …

Hospitals (Civil War)

A wide range of Civil War hospitals in Arkansas included field hospitals established in the immediate aftermath of battle, commandeered houses and churches, and somewhat permanent post hospitals in occupied areas. Union bases tended to have more purpose-built hospital facilities, while Confederate doctors made use of any available buildings, such as colleges, hotels, churches, and private homes. The need for hospital facilities became obvious soon after Arkansas seceded from the Union and the new Confederate recruits became ill from the myriad diseases that afflicted their camps. Hospitals were established wherever large groups of troops gathered, often treating soldiers from specific regiments or from the same states. In early 1862, for instance, Confederate forces in Washington County established the Mount Comfort …

Hot Spring County Courthouse

The Hot Spring County Courthouse, located on 210 Locust Street in downtown Malvern (Hot Spring County), is a three-and-a-half-story building made of brick and steel. The Arkansas Historic Preservation Program declared it architecturally and historically significant for its Art Deco design and status as a former project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program. The National Park Service added it to the National Register of Historic Places on November 7, 1996. After the Cairo and Fulton Railroad established Malvern as a stop along its railway in 1873, the city felt the economic benefits of being connected to other parts of the country. At that time, the adjoining town of Rockport (Hot Spring County) stood as the county …

Hot Spring County Museum

aka: Boyle House
The Hot Spring County Museum in Malvern (Hot Spring County) is centered upon the historic Boyle House and includes exhibits dedicated to the history and unique geography of the area. The Boyle House, a white, two-story-tall building, was built in 1890 on the lot across from where it now sits on East 3rd Street. It was bought by Jacob and Agnus Boyle in 1897. They had come from Hope (Hempstead County) to Malvern to work for the railroad. They had ten children in the home and entertained so much that they had a table that could seat twenty-four people. Today, only four items relating to the Boyle family are in the museum: a couch, the Lena Boyle salt and pepper shaker …

Hot Springs Confederate Monument

The Hot Springs Confederate Monument is a commemorative sculpture erected in 1934 at Landmark Plaza by the Hot Springs Chapter No. 80 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) to commemorate men who had served in the Confederate army during the Civil War. The Hot Springs Chapter of the UDC, like its sister chapters around the state, sought to commemorate Confederate soldiers and veterans, and much of its early work focused on the Confederate Section at Hollywood Cemetery, which the chapter took over from the Albert Pike Camp of United Confederate Veterans (UCV) in 1906. That project was completed in 1919 when a granite monument inscribed “Our Confederate Dead” was placed in the southern end of the plot. The effort …