Gender: Male

Rodriguez, Dionicio

Dionicio Rodriguez, recognized as one of America’s foremost faux bois sculptors, created works that resembled wood, though made of concrete, with its peeling bark, wormholes, and signs of decay. Arkansas was a major beneficiary of his work, which was an outgrowth of a Mexican folk tradition known as el trabajo rustico (rustic work). Under the designation “The Arkansas Sculptures of Dionicio Rodriguez,” his Arkansas work was collectively listed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 4, 1986. Dionicio Rodriguez was born in Toluca, Mexico, the son of Catarine Rodriguez; his birthdate is a matter of some dispute, usually stated as either April 11, 1891, or April 8, 1893. With little formal education, he began, at the age of …

Roe, “Preacher”

aka: Elwin Charles Roe
Elwin Charles “Preacher” Roe played professional baseball with the St. Louis Cardinals, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Brooklyn Dodgers. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Roe was one of the top pitchers in the game. Preacher Roe was born on February 26, 1916, to Charles Edward Roe and Elizabeth (Ducker) Roe in Ash Flat (Sharp County). The Roe family, which included six boys and one girl, moved from Wild Cherry (Fulton County), where they had moved in 1918, to Viola (Fulton County) when Roe was six. Roe’s father played for a semi-professional team in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) but gave up baseball as a career and became a country doctor. Roe got his nickname at about three years of age when …

Roescher, Gustavus

aka: Gus Rusher
Gustavus Roescher, who later went by the Anglicized version of his name, Gus Rusher, was a leading figure in the town of Brinkley (Monroe County), serving as an alderman, restauranteur, hotelier, and banker. Little is known about the early life of Gustavus Roescher. Born in 1860, he immigrated to the United States with his father, Charles Roescher (1833–1890), from the German town of Baden-Baden in the mid-1800s. They settled on a farm outside of Brinkley. Gustavus Roescher owned the Arlington Hotel, which was struck by a cyclone in 1909. Roescher also purchased the Brinkley House, which burned down in 1914. This event prompted Roescher to begin construction on a new hotel with three stories and sixty rooms, which was christened …

Rogers, Anthony Astley Cooper

Anthony Astley Cooper Rogers was a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He represented the Second District of Arkansas in the Forty-First Congress, serving from 1869 to 1871. Anthony Rogers was born on February 14, 1821, in Clarksville, Tennessee. He received only minimal formal education and worked as a clerk in a dry-goods store from age fifteen to twenty-two. Looking for new opportunities, Rogers relocated to Arkansas in 1854, apparently settling in the Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) area, where he bought land and slaves and joined the ranks of planters. With the possibility of civil war on the horizon, and supported by pro-Union forces, Rogers sought election as a delegate to the state secession convention in 1861. Although …

Rogers, John Henry

John Henry Rogers was a Civil War Confederate hero, a lawyer in Fort Smith (Sebastian County), a four-term Congressman, and a United States District Court judge for the Western District of Arkansas. John Rogers was born on October 9, 1845, in Bertie County, North Carolina. His father, Absolom Rogers was a successful planter and slaveholder. In 1861, when Rogers was fifteen years old, he became the drillmaster for a company of home guards, and in March 1862, he was mustered into Company H, Ninth Regiment, Mississippi Volunteers, as a private soldier. Rogers served in the same regiment until it was surrendered at Greensboro, North Carolina, on May 1, 1865. He saw a considerable amount of action and was twice wounded, …

Rogers, Robert L.

Robert Lee (Bob) Rogers served two years in the Arkansas General Assembly, eight years as a prosecuting attorney, and two years as Arkansas’s attorney general, initiating important antitrust suits against monopolistic corporations. He ran unsuccessfully for governor and then became one of the state’s outstanding criminal defense lawyers. He was also a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the recently revived Ku Klux Klan. Bob Rogers was born on January 28, 1868, on a farm at West Point (White County), the oldest child of David E. Rogers and Maria Taylor Rogers. After his father died when he was about eleven, he dropped out of school to become the family’s principal breadwinner. He worked on nearby farms, and, after …

Rolla, Missouri, to Batesville, Expedition from

Several squadrons of the Eleventh Missouri Cavalry Regiment (US) gathered at Rolla, Missouri, and rode more than 200 miles between February 29 and March 13, 1864, to join the Union garrison at Batesville (Independence County). Colonel William D. Wood of the Eleventh Missouri Cavalry ordered Squadrons A and M of the regiment to leave their post in St. Louis on February 10 and take the train to Rolla, where he and the headquarters staff joined them on February 15. Squadrons B, C, E, and G under Major Lymon W. Brown left their station in southwestern Missouri and joined them the next day. After gathering supplies and drilling the troopers for several days, the Federal expedition left for Batesville on the …

Rooker, Oley Eldon

Oley Eldon Rooker was a Little Rock (Pulaski County) businessman whose neighborhood engagement and support of library funding led to a branch of the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS) that opened in 2010 being named in his honor. Oley Eldon Rooker was born on November 2, 1931, in Des Arc (Prairie County) to Darrell Rooker and Tura Louise Guess Rooker. Young Oley and his mother moved to Little Rock at some point—the 1940 census shows him as a resident of the Working Women’s Home in the capital city. His mother married D. Wylie Hall, who would later stand as Rooker’s best man at his wedding. He was an active student, and newspaper accounts of the period show him involved in …

Roots, Logan Holt

Logan Holt Roots settled in Arkansas after serving the Union in the Civil War. He was a congressman, banker, and promoter of the state. Born at Locust Hill, near Tamaroa, Illinois, on March 26, 1841, Roots was the third of four children of Benajah Guernsey Roots, an educator, and Martha Sibley Holt. His early academic interest focused on mathematics, although he worked with an engineering corps engaged in railroad construction at fifteen, acquiring a lifetime interest in railroad development. He enrolled in Illinois State Normal University in 1857, taught for a year then returned and graduated valedictorian in 1862. After graduation, Roots enlisted in the Eighty-first Illinois Infantry, a volunteer regiment, and served in the Union Army until the Civil …

Rose, Henry (Execution of)

Henry Rose was an African American man hanged at Osceola (Mississippi County) on April 4, 1884, for the shotgun slaying of Dempsey Taylor, a wealthy farmer. The 1880 census shows fifty-year-old Dempsey Taylor, who was listed as “mulatto,” living in Mississippi County’s Monroe Township with his wife Melinda and five children. Henry Rose, a seventeen-year-old Black laborer, lived in the same township with his grandparents, as did John Morrow, age twenty-five, a white farmer who lived with his wife and brother. A Tennessee newspaper described Taylor as “popular with his race, but…regarded as [an] impudent and overbearing person by his white neighbors.” On December 4, 1883, the Arkansas Gazette reported, Rose and Morrow argued with Taylor and “had trouble with …

Rose, Robert (Execution of)

Robert Rose died in the electric chair at Tucker Prison Farm on February 23, 1935, a mere fifty-one days following the murder of an Independence County sheriff’s deputy. Robert Rose, age twenty-seven, was born in the Arkansas Ozarks and had attended grammar school at Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) but later moved to Louisiana, where he stole a car in 1930 and was sentenced to five to eight years in prison. Despite two escapes from prison, he was paroled in 1934 and was back at his mother’s Pine Bluff home by Christmas. He soon embarked on a series of burglaries and robberies. On January 2, 1935, Rose and Woodrow Crump went to a gas station in Rosie (Independence County) and ordered …

Rose, Uriah Milton

Uriah Milton Rose was a nationally prominent attorney who practiced in Little Rock (Pulaski County) for more than forty years at what is now known as the Rose Law Firm. He was a founder and president of both the Arkansas Bar Association and the American Bar Association, and he was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt as an ambassador for the United States to the Second Hague Peace Conference in 1907. U. M. Rose was born on March 5, 1834, in Bradfordsville, Kentucky, to Nancy and Joseph Rose. His father was a physician. He was his parents’ third son and had two half-siblings from his father’s first marriage to a Miss Armstrong from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Rose’s mother died in 1848, and …

Rosewater, Benjamin J. (B. J.)

Modern Eureka Springs (Carroll County), including the historic Carnegie Library and Basin Spring Park, owes much of its development to early resident of the city Benjamin J. Rosewater. An energetic advocate of civic improvement and a business leader serving for several years as postmaster, the Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe left a lasting mark on the Ozarks mountain town where he lived for more than sixty years. Born in Hungary in 1857, B. J. Rosewater first came to the United States to visit family in Chicago, Illinois. After moving briefly to Cairo, Illinois, Rosewater visited Eureka Springs in August 1882 in an effort to improve his health. Rosewater quickly recovered from his illness, and he liked the chaotic frontier town …

Ross, Jimmy Douglas

Jimmy Ross was an officer in the U.S. Army who rose to the rank of general. Ross was named as a Distinguished Alumnus of Henderson State University in 1986 and to the university’s Sports Hall of Fame in 2004. Jimmy Douglas Ross was born in Hosston, Louisiana, on May 23, 1936, to Horace and Lucile Ross. The Ross family was originally from Arkadelphia (Clark County), and Horace was a worker in the oil industry. The family had an older son, Bob. The Ross family moved to Curtis (Clark County) in 1942 before living in Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, and California. Returning to Curtis in 1945, Jimmy Ross attended school in Arkadelphia. Playing football, basketball, and baseball, as well as running track, …

Ross, Michael Avery (Mike)

A native of southwestern Arkansas, Mike Ross served six terms in the U.S. Congress from the Fourth Congressional District spanning the southern portion of Arkansas. Even as voters in his district became hostile to Democrats, Ross was able to maintain popularity in the district through a conservative persona and voting record. After leaving Congress in 2013, Ross became the Democratic nominee for governor in 2014. He was defeated soundly in an election cycle that marked the culmination of a sea-change toward Republican dominance in the formerly Democratic state. Michael Avery Ross was born in Texarkana (Miller County) on August 2, 1961, to Gene and Frances Ross, who were both public school educators. The family lived in a variety of towns …

Rothert, Matt, Sr.

Matthew Herman (Matt) Rothert Sr., a nationally recognized coin collector, was responsible for having “In God We Trust” placed on U.S. paper currency. He was a furniture manufacturer and president of the American Numismatic Association (ANA) from 1965 to 1967. Matt Rothert was born on March 17, 1904 in Huntingburg, Indiana. Little is known of his family, though he had at least two sisters. Rothert received a BS from Notre Dame University in 1924, moved to Camden (Ouachita County), and founded the Camden Furniture Company, serving as its president until he retired in 1975. On April 10, 1937, he married Janet Hope Firring. They had two boys and two girls. Rothert’s interest in numismatics, or coin collecting, began when he …

Rottaken, Herbert H.

Herbert H. Rottaken was a larger-than-life presence in post–Civil War Little Rock (Pulaski County). A Union army officer during the Civil War, he moved to Little Rock in 1868 and, six years later, was a colonel in Governor Elisha Baxter’s militia during the Brooks-Baxter War. Afterward, he served as Pulaski County sheriff, chief of the city’s volunteer fire department, county assessor, and two-term city alderman. An ardent sportsman and renowned marksman, he was, the Arkansas Gazette declared, “as great a Nimrod as ever was.” In his eclectic business career, Rottaken was a successful planter, developer, inventor, and investor, often dealing in highly speculative ventures as well as conventional ones. Herbert Rottaken was born in Elberfeld, in what is now Germany, …