Photos of the Day - Starting with J

Though best known as the football coach and athletic director at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), John “Barnie” Barnhill was an accomplished college football player in his own right. As an offensive and defensive guard at the University of Tennessee, he lettered from 1925 to 1927 and was named to the All-Southern teams during his last two years of competition. He is shown here as the team captain in this 1927 photograph.

The Maynard Pioneer Park and Museum, located in the small town of Maynard (Randolph County), was founded in 1980. The park and museum reflect life in the Ozarks around the end of the nineteenth century, and the museum, shown here, also preserves pictures, documents, and artifacts of that time. Each September, the park hosts a well-attended craft fair and festival.

In this 1907 proclamation, President Theodore Roosevelt declared that land in the public domain south of the Arkansas River would be designated as the Arkansas National Forest. The name of the area, which today consists of approximately 1.8 million acres, was changed to the Ouachita National Forest in 1926. Celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2007, it is the oldest national forest in the country’s system.

In the early 1970s, Mary Gay Shipley, then a schoolteacher, had seen a void in her hometown and had been inspired to open a paperback exchange store called The Book Rack. Shipley’s bookstore moved to the location shown here in 1976 and became known officially as That Bookstore in Blytheville in 1994. The bookstore has become one of the major stops for world-renowned authors who travel to the northeast Arkansas town of Blytheville (Mississippi County) to participate in weekly book programs.

Composer Conlon Nancarrow of Texarkana (Miller County) wrote music with as many as twelve tempos to be played at once. This 1998 print by artist Bradford Graves captures his frustration that no one could play his compositions. Eventually discovering that the complex rhythms could be cut on a player piano roll, he composed more than fifty Studies for Player Piano.

The 510-ton Union ironclad the USS Mound City, shown here late in the Civil War, was involved in what has been called the “most deadly shot” of the war. While participating in the Engagement at St. Charles on the White River on June 17, 1862, the vessel took a single shot to the steam drum. Escaping steam scalded many of the crew, ultimately resulting in 105 deaths and forty-four injuries. Disabled and towed to safety, the ship was repaired and served until war’s end, when it was sold at auction and salvaged.

Approximately 150 commercial vineyards and wineries have operated in Arkansas since 1870. In 2009, the Arkansas General Assembly took note of this agricultural mainstay when it designated the Cynthiana, a native grape, as Arkansas’s official state grape. It is the oldest native North American grape in commercial use today with Arkansas and Missouri being the nation’s main producers. Shown here is the grape being harvested at the Post Familie Vineyards and Winery at Altus (Franklin County).

When Charles Murphy Sr. suffered a stroke in 1941, his twenty-one-year-old son, Charles Jr., pictured here, assumed management of the family business interests in timber, banking, and oil. In 1946, he and his siblings pooled their business interests into what, in 1964, became Murphy Oil Corporation, one of the most successful companies in the United States. Murphy served as the company’s chairman of the board until 1994.

Simon Pollard Hughes, an ex-Confederate officer, was a typical post-Reconstruction conservative Democratic politician. He was elected to the Arkansas House of Representatives in 1866 and then served one term as the state’s attorney general. He was elected governor twice, the first time in 1884, but was denied nomination for a third term in 1888. His longest time in office was as associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, in which he served from 1889 to 1904. He died in 1906.

Folklorist Vance Randolph, who studied the people and culture of the Ozarks, lived in a small Missouri town when this late-1930s photo was taken. According to Robert Cochran in Vance Randolph: An Ozark Life, he maintained the dress and appearance of “a man of the world,” as he was described in 1936. Randolph later moved to Eureka Springs (Carroll County) and also had a house in Fayetteville (Washington County).

Incorporated in 1848, Clarksville (Johnson County) slowly began to develop a business section, with one of the first businesses established by John C. Hill. By 1883, Hill’s enterprise occupied a substantial brick building located on Main Street. By the time this photo was taken in the early part of the twentieth century, the building was occupied by, among others, the law offices of M. T. Brisco, Reynolds & Reynolds.

While football is the major fall sport in many of the larger Arkansas schools, basketball is king with many of the state’s smaller school districts. Shown here in 1972 are two of those small schools, Williford (white jerseys) and Biggers-Reyno, competing in the district tournament. This was the first Williford (Sharp County) team to go to the state basketball tournament. Both of the schools have been consolidated and no longer exist.