Entry Type: Thing

USS Sevier (APA-233)

The USS Sevier (APA-233) was a 6,720-ton Haskell-class attack transport built in 1944 and named for counties in three states, including Arkansas. The Kaiser Company of Vancouver, Washington, laid down the hull for the USS Sevier on October 4, 1944, under a contract with the Maritime Commission. It launched on November 16, 1944. The Sevier was commissioned on December 5, 1944, under Captain A. R. Ponto. The ship was 455 feet long and 62 feet wide and could reach speeds of 17.7 knots. It had a crew of fifty-six officers and 490 sailors and could carry up to eighty-six officers and 1,440 men. The Sevier was armed with one 5-inch gun, one quad-40mm antiaircraft mount, four twin 40mm guns, and …

USS St. Francis River (LSMR-525)

The USS St. Francis River (LSMR-525) was an LSMR-501 Class landing craft medium (Rockets) that was built in 1945 and saw service in the Korean War and the Vietnam War. LSMR-525 was designated the USS St. Francis River on October 1, 1955, in honor of the St. Francis River, which flows through Missouri and Arkansas, and another river of the same name in Maine. The USS St. Francis River was one of a class of ships designed to provide fire support for combat operations ashore. The vessel weighed 520 tons, was 203.5 feet long and 34.5 feet wide, and could reach speeds of 13 knots. It was armed with one five-inch gun, four 4.2-inch mortars, and two 40mm antiaircraft guns. …

USS Stone County (LST-1141)

The USS Stone County (LST-1141) was an LST-542–class tank landing ship built in 1945 that saw service in the Pacific after World War II and in the Korean and Vietnam wars. It was designated the USS Stone County on July 1, 1955, in honor of counties in Arkansas, Missouri, and Mississippi. LST-1141 was one of a class of vessels—called Landing Ship, Tank—created to carry tanks, wheeled and tracked vehicles, artillery, construction equipment, and supplies during military operations along coastal areas. Called “Large Slow Targets” by their crews, they were designed as shallow-draft vessels; when carrying a 500-ton load, LST-1141 drew only three feet eleven inches forward and nine feet ten inches aft. They carried pontoons amidships that could be used …

USS Tensas

aka: Tom Sugg [Steamboat]
The USS Tensas was originally the steamboat Tom Sugg, which was captured by Federal troops during the Little Rock Campaign of 1863 and refitted as a tinclad gunboat before again returning to private service in 1865. The Tom Sugg was a sixty-two-ton sidewheel paddleboat built at Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1860. The vessel was ninety-one feet and eight inches long and twenty-two feet and five inches wide. By 1862, the steamboat was being used by Confederate forces in Arkansas, and in the spring of 1862, Captain John W. Dunnington “armored” it with cotton bales and mounted an 8-inch cannon on its bow so that it could be used against Major General Samuel R. Curtis’s Army of the Southwest. While there are …

USS Thach (FFG-43)

The USS Thach was an Oliver Hazard Perry–class guided missile frigate launched in 1982 and named after John Smith (Jimmie) Thach, an innovative World War II Navy aviator who rose to the rank of full admiral. In a nearly thirty-year career, the Thach was active in both military and anti-narcotic operations. Jimmie Thach was born in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) on April 19, 1905. As a naval aviator during World War II, he developed a system in which two planes would weave back and forth when under attack, drawing the attacking fighter into the line of fire of one of the American planes; the “Thach Weave” was credited with increasing the downing of Japanese planes during crucial battles in the …

USS Tyler

The 180-foot-long A. O. Tyler, a Mississippi and Ohio river packet named for its original owner, was the largest of three side-wheeled steamboats purchased by the United States War Department for conversion into river gunboats at the beginning of the Civil War. Navy commander John Rodgers, the purchaser of the craft, felt it inappropriate to call the boat Tyler since former President James Tyler was a leading secessionist, preferring instead to refer to the boat as Taylor for unionist Zachary Taylor. However, the name Tyler remained official. During the first year and a half of the war, the gunboat was under U.S. Army control as part of the Western Gunboat Flotilla—yet was staffed by naval officers—to provide artillery support for General …

USS Van Buren (PF-42)

The USS Van Buren was a Tacoma-class patrol frigate launched in 1944 that served in the New Guinea campaign in the western Pacific during World War II. The USS Van Buren was the second U.S. naval vessel to bear that name. The first was an early nineteenth-century revenue cutter named for U.S. president Martin Van Buren. The World War II patrol frigate was named in honor of the city of Van Buren, the county seat of Crawford County. The Van Buren’s hull was laid down on June 24, 1943, by Consolidated Steel Corporation in Los Angeles, California. The vessel was launched on July 27. It was commissioned at Terminal Island on December 17 under the command of Lieutenant Commander Charles …

USS White River (LSMR-536)

The USS White River (LSMR-536) was an LSMR-501 Class landing craft medium (Rockets) that was built in 1945 and saw service in the Korean War and the Vietnam War. LSMR-536 was designated the USS White River on October 1, 1955, in honor of rivers in seven states, including Arkansas. The USS White River was one of a class of ships designed to provide fire support for combat operations ashore. The vessel weighed 520 tons, was 203.5 feet long and 34.5 feet wide, and could reach speeds of 13 knots. It was armed with one five-inch gun, four 4.2-inch mortars, and two 40mm antiaircraft guns. Ten rocket projectors were continuously fed, with each firing thirty pin-stabilized five-inch rockets per minute, allowing …

Usury

The concept of usury (defined as the lending of money with an interest charge—usually an exorbitant one) and its application to the lending function have generated significant head scratching and hand wringing over the years, especially in Arkansas. In fact, for much of recorded history, the lending of money at interest has simply not been considered a wholesome activity. In some early Jewish and Christian communities, it was considered immoral to take advantage of a needy neighbor by adding interest at any rate to his already burdensome debts. To this day, some majority-Muslim countries observing the law of Sharia, as set forth in the Koran and the Sunna, prohibit lending at interest at any rate, based on the same rationale. …

Vaden Records

Vaden Records, based in Trumann (Poinsett County), started as a mail-order company featuring gospel music. It soon grew into a regional studio that released music by such blues and early rock and roll artists as Bobby Brown, Teddy Riedel, Larry Donn, and many others who went on to regional and national fame. In the early 1950s, husband and wife Arlen and Jackie Vaden of Trumann were singing gospel music all over northeastern Arkansas in a group called the Southern Gospel Singers. They also started singing on local radio stations in Osceola (Mississippi County) and Blytheville (Mississippi County) and soon branched out to stations in other states, such as XREF in Del Rio, Texas, and XEG Radio in Fort Worth, Texas; XREF …

Van Buren Confederate Monument

The Van Buren Confederate Monument is a sculpture erected in 1898 in Fairview Cemetery by the Mary Lee Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to commemorate local men who had served in the Confederate army during the Civil War. It was moved to the grounds of the Crawford County Courthouse eight years later. As many as 1,000 Crawford County men fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, and on March 19, 1896, the Mary Lee Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy organized in Van Buren (Crawford County) with a goal of raising a monument to honor them and other Confederate soldiers who died in the area. The chapter was effective at fundraising, and in 1898 …

Van Buren County Courthouse

The Van Buren County Courthouse in Clinton (Van Buren County) is situated in the hilly terrain of northern Arkansas. It was built with local materials from a quarry outside of Dennard (Van Buren County), with walls made of reddish sandstone. The smallest courthouse in the state, it measures just 100 feet by 43 feet, with a basement. The Arkansas Historic Preservation Program (AHPP) recognizes the building as historically significant as a New Deal–era public works project, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 13, 1991. After Van Buren County was established on November 11, 1833, the county elite housed the first two courthouses in one-room log structures near the now-defunct community of Mudtown, whose …

Van Buren County Road 2E Bridge

The Van Buren County 2E Bridge is an open masonry substructure bridge crossing a tributary of Driver’s Creek near Scotland (Van Buren County) built under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a Depression-era federal relief agency. In 1940, Van Buren County received a $117,789 grant from the Works Progress Administration to “improve and construct roads. Work includes clearing, grubbing, excavating and surfacing; moving fences, constructing and reconstructing bridges and drainage structures, and performing incidental and appurtenant work.” The construction of a bridge across a Driver’s Creek tributary on a rural Van Buren County road was almost certainly part of this project since no individual WPA project card exists for the bridge. Its designer is not known but could …

Van Buren Post Office

The Van Buren Post Office at 22 South 7th Street in Van Buren (Crawford County) is a one-story, brick-masonry structure built in 1936–37 and designed in a restrained, minimalist interpretation of the Art Deco style of architecture. It contains a mural financed through the U.S. Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture (later renamed the Section of Fine Arts), a Depression-era stimulus project that promoted public art. The post office was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on August 14, 1998. On November 1, 1935, the Van Buren Press Argus announced that a plot of land on the corner of South 7th and Webster streets would be the site of a new city post office. Postal engineer R. …

Van Winkle’s Mill

Van Winkle’s Mill was a series of gristmills and sawmills operated by Peter Van Winkle near Rogers (Benton County) before and after the Civil War. The Van Winkle Mill Site, which became part of Hobbs State Park-Conservation Area, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 15, 2007. Peter Van Winkle was born on February 25, 1814, in New York City. He purchased land in Washington County in 1835 and, by 1850, was in business as a farmer, blacksmith, and wagon maker. Within a year, he had established a mill in Benton County. His first mill was powered by oxen and then by horses, and in 1856 he moved his operation to Van Hollow and used a …

Vanadium Mining

Major deposits of vanadium were discovered in central Arkansas by Union Carbide’s Western Exploration Group in the 1960s. Vanadium orebodies are found in two isolated igneous intrusive complexes in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas: the Potash Sulphur Springs (now Wilson Springs) complex located in Garland County and the Magnet Cove complex in Hot Spring County. The Wilson Springs vanadium deposits were the first to be mined solely for vanadium in the United States. The major use of vanadium is as an alloying metal in iron and steel (ferroalloy). Small amounts of vanadium added to iron and steel significantly increase its strength, improve toughness and ductility, and reduce weight, making it suitable for structural and pipeline steel. Vanadium also increases high-temperature …

Vapors, The [Book]

Written by Hot Springs (Garland County) native David Hill, The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice is a nonfiction work released to great acclaim in July 2020. The word “vapors” in the title represents the nightclub of the same name and the steam emitted from the area’s warm underground springs, but also perhaps the illusory wisps of a vanished world. Hill captures the notorious heyday of Hot Springs as a center of open gambling, presenting the story not only using historical documentation but also through the experiences of the author’s own family members who were part of the town’s casino culture. Some historians have cited …

Varner Unit

The Varner Unit is a detention facility run by the Arkansas Department of Correction. It is located in the Choctaw Township of Lincoln County, along U.S. Highway 65, about thirty miles south of Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). The Varner Unit was constructed in response to the state’s fast-growing inmate population; other state facilities had been expanded prior to Varner’s construction. When it opened in 1987, it could accommodate 300 prisoners; its capacity was increased to 700 and then later to around 1,700. The Varner Unit is made up of two separate units: the Supermax Unit and the Varner Unit. The Supermax Unit was opened in 2000 and in 2003 became home to all the state’s male death row inmates. In …

Velvatex College of Beauty Culture

In 1926, M. E. Patterson of Little Rock (Pulaski County) incorporated Velvatex College of Beauty Culture, then known as Velvatex Beauty College, which was the state’s only approved beauty school for people of color. (A history produced by the school, however, lists its beginning operation year as 1929.) The school was founded after Patterson, who had often done hairdressing in her home kitchen, chose to teach others the skills of the trade in a more formal educational setting—and to help men and women become entrepreneurs. Patterson dubbed the school “Velvatex” because she believed African-American hair emulated the feel of velvet. By the height of the Great Depression, many black-owned industries had taken a hit, but beauty salons were plentiful throughout …

Venomous Snakes

Arkansas hosts about forty-five species and subspecies of snakes, and six (thirteen percent) are species that use venom to obtain food and to defend themselves. There are two families of venomous snakes in the state: Elapidae (a single elapid species, the Texas coral snake) and Viperidae (five species of pitvipers). All of Arkansas’s venomous snakes inject venom through fangs via muscular contraction of paired venom glands. Texas Coral Snake The Texas coral snake, Micrurus tener tener (formerly Micrurus fulvius tenere) is a tricolored, medium-sized (maximum length = 122 centimeters), secretive elapid snake that primarily occurs in the southern and southwestern part of the state. Verified records are available for only five counties of the state in the Gulf Coastal Plain, …

Vernon and Moore-McIlroy Produce Warehouse

The Vernon & Moore-McIlroy Produce Warehouse is located in Fayetteville (Washington County) at 200 N. West Avenue, on the northeast corner of N. West Avenue and W. Spring Street. Built circa 1906, the warehouse is a one-story, red masonry commercial building with Italianate influences. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 10, 2020. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, the produce industry (in particular the cultivation of apples) was the primary economic enterprise for northwestern Arkansas. With the increasing production of apples, an industrial infrastructure developed to support it. This was seen in the many types of businesses established throughout the region, which included nurseries, barrel factories, ice plants, cold storage warehouses, …

Vertac

The Vertac site in Jacksonville (Pulaski County) is one of the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites and Arkansas’s most publicized Superfund site. Cleanup of the area after its abandonment by its corporate owner took more than a decade, and the name “Vertac” soon became synonymous in Arkansas with the fear of industrial pollution, similar to how New Yorkers view Love Canal. The Vertac site was originally part of the Arkansas Ordnance Plant (AOP), a World War II–era facility that manufactured various components of explosive devices, such as primers and detonators. In 1946, the federal government offered the AOP facilities for sale to private companies. The future Vertac site was purchased in 1948 by Reasor-Hill Company, which produced pesticides, as did …

Vestal Nursery

aka: J. W. Vestal & Son
The Vestal Nursery, based in the Baring Cross neighborhood of North Little Rock (Pulaski County), operated for more than 100 years, cultivating and shipping flowers across the United States. By the mid-twentieth century, it had one of the largest greenhouse spaces in the United States. Joseph Wysong Vestal, a Quaker horticulturist in Cambridge City, Indiana, grew and sold plants as early as 1855, following prior Vestal family advancements in horticultural technology. By 1860, J. W. Vestal was cultivating greenhouse flowers. As the Arkansas Democrat Magazine wrote, “From 300 square feet of glass, he made additions annually, thus being able to accumulate an astonishingly large variety of plants.” In 1861, Vestal began publishing an annual floral and vegetable catalogue first titled …