Entries - Gender: Male - Starting with O

John O’Donnell, a Roman Catholic priest, served as pastor in various parishes across Arkansas in a career that spanned over sixty years. During that time, he also became known for his work on social justice and civil rights, sometimes being labeled a renegade. Unafraid to speak his mind, he stood up for his beliefs even when it made him unpopular. In a 2015 Arkansas Catholic article, he said, “My viewpoint was that we ought to be at the forefront of peace and racial justice and common sense and respect….We must live and act as we believe. I think the church or the priest should be there promoting justice.” John F. O’Donnell, the youngest son of Irish immigrants Henry and Bridgett …

Although many lynchings in Arkansas occurred in connection with serious crimes, real or alleged, there were some people lynched for trivial reasons. On May 13, 1897, an African-American man named Presley Oats was, according to national reports, dragged from his home in Pope County and lynched for supposedly stealing a ham. This incident preceded the Atkins Race War, which began approximately two weeks later. It was, however, indicative of the racial animus caused by the recent influx of African Americans into the county. Many of these new arrivals accepted lower wages for farm work and work in the lumber mills, causing resentment among area whites. Although one newspaper account of the incident referred to Presley Oats as an “old negro,” …

Dunbar Hunt Ogden Jr. was a Presbyterian minister who played an important role in the effort to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock (Pulaski County) in the mid-twentieth century. His support for the Little Rock Nine was controversial, and his efforts split his congregation. Ultimately, faced with diminishing support, Ogden resigned his pastorate and left Arkansas, taking over a church in West Virginia and eventually retiring in California. Dunbar Ogden Jr. was born on August 15, 1902, in Columbus, Mississippi. One of seven children born to Dunbar H. Ogden, who was a minister, and Grace Augusta Cox Ogden, Ogden was brought up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Atlanta, Georgia. He attended Boys High School in Atlanta before going to Davidson …

Mahlon Dickerson (M. D.) Ogden was a physician who cofounded Trinity Hospital of Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1923. At Trinity, he pioneered the use of the health maintenance organization (HMO)—a form of health insurance in which member physicians provide medical care to subscribers for a fixed fee—in Arkansas. Born on December 5, 1881, in Little Rock, M. D. Ogden was the only son of railroad clerk Charles Cullen Ogden and his wife, Altamira Deason Ogden. An older cousin, Fred R. Bryson, was adopted into the family and became Ogden’s legal brother. Educated in the local schools, Ogden graduated from the Arkansas Medical School (now the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences) in 1904. From 1905 to 1916, he taught …

Old Mike is the name given to a traveling salesman who died in 1911 in Prescott (Nevada County). The people of Prescott only knew him by his first name, Mike. He was subsequently embalmed and publicly displayed for over sixty years. Mike visited Prescott about once a month to sell pens, paper, and thread to homes and businesses near the railroad tracks in the center of town. He would arrive on the southbound 3:00 p.m. train and stay overnight. The next day, he would re-board the 3:00 p.m. train and continue his journey. During one trip to Prescott, Mike probably attended an outdoor revival in the city park. The next day, August 21, 1911, his body was found underneath a …

William Allan Oldfield was elected as a Democrat to the Sixty-first U.S. Congress and to the nine succeeding Congresses, serving from 1909 until his death in 1928. During that time, he served as a member of the House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means and was chosen as chair of the Democratic Congressional Committee, campaigning across the country for Democratic candidates and incumbents. He was reelected to the Seventy-first Congress, his tenth consecutive term, but he died before he could take office. After a special election, his wife took his place in Congress, becoming the first woman in Arkansas elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. William A. Oldfield was born in Franklin (Izard County) on February 4, 1874, …

Williamson S. Oldham was a lawyer and politician who was born and reared in Tennessee. He was elected twice to the Arkansas House of Representatives and once to the Arkansas Supreme Court, but subsequent failed efforts to get elected to the U.S. Congress from Arkansas convinced him that Texas was a more promising venue for a political career. The results in the Lone Star State were similar—small victories but ultimate frustrations in his ambition to go to the national Congress. He was a major figure, and frequent critic, however, in the congress of the Confederacy, and after the war he wrote a memoir that detailed the rise and fall of the Confederacy. Williamson Simpson Oldham was born on June 19, …

On July 28, 1884, an African-American man named Dan Oliver was shot by a mob near Roseville (Logan County) for allegedly attempting to assault the daughter of a local white man identified only by his last name, Amos. Amos, whom the Arkansas Gazette called “one of the best citizens of Logan County,” was probably Elisha Amos. According to public records, Elisha Amos was born in Tennessee in 1841, and by 1860, he and his parents were living in Arkansas. He married Malinda Ann Pendergraft in Franklin County in 1862, and served in the Civil War. In 1870, he and Malinda and two children, Jesse (three years old) and Emily (six months), were living in Sebastian County. Elisha Amos was living …

Marvin Elmer Oliver was an artist, farmer, and civil service employee in the Arkansas Ozarks. In 1955, he produced a book, Strange Scenes in the Ozarks, which attracted notice because of its unique artistic qualities. Text and illustrations were printed using the silk-screen (or serigraph) process, assembled by hand, and enclosed in a handmade cover. Oliver published 400 copies. The text describes the backwoods life Oliver remembered, which was almost completely gone by the time he produced his book. His distinctive illustrations make Strange Scenes in the Ozarks an item of interest to collectors of Arkansiana and of regional art. Oliver later published Old Mills of the Ozarks (1969) with black-and-white sketches, descriptions, and locations of twenty water-powered mills. M. …

Edward Otho C. Ord was a major general in the Union army during the Civil War and commanded the Department of Arkansas and the Fourth Military District during Reconstruction. Born in Cumberland, Maryland, on October 18, 1818, Edward O. C. Ord was the son of James and Rebecca Ord. The family moved to Washington DC when Ord was young. Tutored by his father, he was known as a mathematical genius. He entered the United States Military Academy at West Point at the age of sixteen. He graduated in 1839 and received a commission as a second lieutenant in the Third United States Artillery. After service during the Second Seminole War and a promotion to first lieutenant in 1841, Ord sailed …

Arkansas’s original Tuskegee Airmen were a part of a segregated group composed of African American Army Air Corps cadets, personnel, and support staff known as the Tuskegee Airmen. There were twelve Arkansans documented who performed and maintained various roles at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Those roles included flight instructor, pilot, flight officer, engineer, bombardier, navigator, radio technician, air traffic controller, parachute rigger, weather observer, medical professional, and electronic communications specialist. Other support staff may have included Arkansans. The term “original” is applied to the individuals who received government and civilian instructional training while at Tuskegee between 1941 and 1946. Approximately 992 pilots were trained at Tuskegee, 450 of whom saw action overseas during the war; four of those were …

David Orr was one of the earliest preachers in northeastern Arkansas, settling in the state in about 1828. During his time in the region, he started nine different churches and founded the Spring River and Rocky Bayou Baptist Associations in the Ozark Mountains east of the White River. Although Orr was exclusively a Baptist preacher, he was also interested in modern-day religious revelations, such as those of the Mormons and New York farmer William Miller. After his birth in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in 1798, Orr lived near Cincinnati, Ohio, seventy miles away from his birthplace. While in Cincinnati, he was influenced and baptized by Jeremiah Vardeman, a fiery revivalist preacher during the Second Great Awakening. Orr married Eliza Caldwell in …

Zaphney Orto, a prominent physician who helped discover the link between malaria and mosquitoes, was a U.S. army major and surgeon during the Spanish-American War, and the second president of Simmons First National Bank, founded in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). Born to Leonidas Orto and Martha G. McElwee Orto in Somerville, Tennessee, in 1842, Zaphney Orto lived on a farm near Somerville until he was eighteen, then worked in a store for two years. He studied medicine with Dr. S. W. Thompson of Evansville, Indiana, and graduated from the Miami Medical College of Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1872. Shortly afterward, he moved to Arkansas, where he settled in Clover Bend (Lawrence County). He practiced medicine there for two years before moving …

On September 8, 1884 (some papers give the date as September 9), a white man named Mat Orton was lynched in Arkansas City (Desha County) for allegedly setting a fire that destroyed many of the town’s businesses. There is some information about Mat Orton in newspaper accounts and public records. In 1880, he was thirty-three years old and was living in Arkansas City and working as a carpenter. He married Margaret McCoy there on March 14, 1882. An article in the Arkansas Gazette on May 16, 1883, indicates that Orton was a deputy sheriff and was sent to retrieve R. H. Costello (sometimes called Castelio, although census records list him as Costelo), who was wanted in Desha County for the …

Peter Joseph Osterhaus was a German immigrant who rose through the ranks in the Civil War to the post of major general of volunteers in U.S. Army. He fought in several Trans-Mississippi battles, including Pea Ridge and Arkansas Post, and was the most accomplished of the German-born generals who fought for the Union. Peter Joseph Osterhaus was born on January 4, 1823, in Koblenz, Prussia, the second of three sons of contractor Josef Adolf Oisterhusz and Eleanora Kraemer Oisterhusz, who chose to change their sons’ surnames to the German version. He received a military education and served in the Twenty-Ninth Reserve Regiment of the Prussian army. Osterhaus was involved in the revolutions that convulsed Europe in 1848–1849 and was forced …

Gus Ottenheimer, an industrialist, became known nationally through his successful efforts in manufacturing women’s garments. He was a land developer as well, and he spent much of the last one-third of his life promoting higher education in central Arkansas. Ottenheimer was born in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on July 18, 1897, to Daniel Ottenheimer and Hannah Berger. He was the youngest of four children. The Ottenheimers were a Jewish pioneer family, some of whom came to the state in the 1850s. Ottenheimer’s father died in 1908. The eldest son, Leonard, became the family breadwinner at age sixteen and forfeited his education to his younger brother. Ottenheimer graduated in 1918 from Washington & Lee University School of Law in Lexington, Virginia, …

Perry Wayne Ouzts, a professional jockey from Lepanto (Poinsett County), is one of twenty-one professional riders to have won 5,000 races. Around horseracing tracks, he is nicknamed the “Workingman’s Hero” or, for his unique riding style, “Scoot N’ Boot.” He has also been noted for overcoming numerous potentially career-ending injuries. Perry Ouzts was born in Lepanto on July 7, 1954, but was raised primarily in Rivervale (Poinsett County). During his years in Rivervale, Ouzts began riding horses with his cousins Earlie and Jackie Fires. Earlie Fires was eventually inducted into the Hall of Fame of Jockeys, while Jackie’s career ended when his body was crushed during a horse race in 1977, paralyzing him. Ouzts began riding professionally in the spring …

William Ray Overton was a U.S. district judge from 1979 to 1987 and is best known for his ruling in the McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education court case, which held the teaching of creationism to be unconstitutional. William Ray Overton was born on September 19, 1939, in Hot Spring County to Elizabeth Ford and Odis Ray Overton, a mine foreman at Magnet Cove (Hot Spring County). His mother, who taught several subjects in Hot Spring County’s public school system, was known for her skill with the English language; Overton joked that he got some learning in language by osmosis. Overton was an only child. His father died in 1957 when Overton was sixteen years old. In 1963, his mother …

Hurley Owen, an African-American man, was lynched in Texarkana (Miller County) on May 19, 1922, in front of a mob numbering in the thousands for the alleged crime of murdering a local police officer. His body was subsequently burned. Hurley Owen (or Hullen Owens, as his name was sometimes reported) had been arrested on Thursday, May 18, 1922, on a charge of stealing automotive parts. The following afternoon, he reportedly told Patrolman Richard C. Choate and Police Chief L. J. Lummus that he was willing to show them where he had hidden away more stolen goods. They followed him into an alley, where he pulled a .45 caliber pistol from a trash bin. According to the Arkansas Democrat, Lummus then …

Freeman Harrison Owens was a pioneer cinematographer and inventor of cinematic technology, including the A. C. Nielsen Rating System, a plastic lens for Kodak, and the method of adding synchronized sound to film. He is credited with 11,812 inventions and held 200 patents during his lifetime. Freeman Owens was born on July 20, 1890, in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). He was the only child of Charles H. Owens and Christabel Harrison Owens and grandson of Arkansas Supreme Court judge William M. Harrison. Owens attended Sixth and Beech Street Elementary School, but he dropped out during his senior year at Pine Bluff High School. He went to work for a movie theater when he was twelve years old. He cleaned the …

Historian George C. Wright wrote in his 1990 book Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and “Legal Lynchings”: “Because Afro-Americans were frequently lynched in a dramatic fashion to warn others, it is possible that much more is known about their deaths than about those of the whites who died at the hands of lynch mobs.” Such seems to be the case with the 1879 lynching of Henry Owens in Clarendon (Monroe County), which was reported in the Arkansas Gazette only at the bottom of another article describing the likelihood of a different person being lynched. On September 28, 1879, the Gazette reported that a man named Jerry Raper, “a murderer whose deed of cold blood has rarely been …

Silas Owens Sr. was an African American stonemason, carpenter, and farmer from Faulkner County. Owens was known in the central Arkansas area for his superior craftsmanship and a vernacular style of construction known by the twenty-first century as the Mixed Masonry. This style of architecture could be found throughout Arkansas, and there were many contemporary masons who utilized the technique; however, Owens’s work stood out. His artistic eye, exhaustive work ethic, and exacting coursing methods resulted in a deliberate pattern that became his trademark. Silas Owens Sr. was born on December 26, 1907, to Haywood and Matilda Owens in the Faulkner County community of Solomon Grove (which merged with Zion Grove to become Twin Groves in 1991). He and his …

William Owens was an African American man executed at Varner (Lincoln County) on May 30, 1895, after being convicted of first-degree murder in the death of his wife. William Owens’s wife, whose name was not included in any news reports, was “intimate with a neighbor named Will Collins” on May 17, 1894, and Owens beat her, leading her to move into her father’s house. On May 30, he found her hoeing cotton with around thirty other people in a field near Noble Lake (Jefferson County). He asked her to come back to him, and when she “flatly refused” he pulled a pistol and shot her before grabbing a hoe and hitting her on the head twice, breaking the handle. He …

The scouting expedition from Ozark, Missouri, to Dubuque Crossing (Boone County) and Sugar Loaf Prairie (Boone County) was conducted to determine whether any Confederate soldiers were threatening a detached outpost of the Second Arkansas Cavalry (US) at Ozark. Company D of the Second Arkansas Cavalry (US) was sent to man an outpost at Ozark, Missouri, in July 1864 and was “engaged in scouting through a rough country, guarding against a surprise by the enemy.” A detachment of one officer and twenty men was sent to Arkansas on August 23, 1864, on such a mission. The Arkansas troops ventured to Dubuque, then crossed the White River and went another ten miles to Sugar Loaf Prairie. Captain John C. Bailey reported to …

The weeklong expedition from Ozark, Missouri, into Marion County was a successful Union operation that resulted in the destruction of a major Confederate saltpeter manufacturing facility and the capture of forty-two Confederate soldiers. Captain Milton Burch of the Fourteenth Missouri State Militia left Ozark on December 9, 1862, with forty men from his regiment. They reached the Federal post at Lawrence’s Mill that evening and conferred with the officers based there, learning that Captain Jesse Mooney and seventy-five Confederate irregulars were camped at Talbot’s Ferry on the White River in Arkansas. Reinforced by sixty men of the Seventy-third Enrolled Missouri Militia, the expedition continued its march toward Arkansas. On the morning of December 11, the Federal column left the road …