Photos of the Day - Starting with M

The first interment at Oakland Cemetery in Camden (Ouachita County) took place in the early 1820s. Perhaps its most famous occupant is Porter Clay, the half-brother of national politician Henry Clay. A portion of the cemetery, shown here, serves as the last resting place of several hundred Confederate soldiers and is the largest Confederate burial site in the area. While the Oakland Cemetery as a whole was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2000, the Confederate section was added in 1996.

Pocahontas became the seat of Randolph County government with the county’s creation in 1835. Before the end of the decade, a two-story courthouse was constructed. After the building collapsed in 1870, a new courthouse, shown in this photograph, was built. Known as the “Old Courthouse” by today’s local citizens, it remained in use until 1940 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

Long before the supermarket came along, rural Arkansans depended upon the local grocery store for the necessities of life. Many times, the local business was the only one of its kind for miles around. The long abandoned Turnbo’s Grocery, located in the Baxter County community of Three Brothers, was typical of such a store. While the numbers of such stores are smaller in today’s modern world, many still exist in small-town Arkansas.

The post office in Waters, shown here in 1960, opened in 1886 in this unincorporated village on the western side of Montgomery County. During the Arkansas Centennial celebration in 1936, the name was changed to “Pine Ridge” during a ceremony at the State Capitol in Little Rock (Pulaski County). The change was made in honor of Lum and Abner, a popular radio show set in a fictional town of Pine Ridge, which was largely based on the people and characteristics of Waters.

The Arkansas History Commission and State Archives, which today houses the state’s largest collection of documents, photographs, and other Arkansas history materials, was created in 1905 by the Arkansas General Assembly. The holdings of the commission, which are today administered by seven directors, were moved into the Arkansas State Capitol in 1915, where they remained until they were moved to the Old State House in 1951. In 1979, the commission holdings were moved to the grounds of the capitol once again, this time to a new 30,000-square-foot facility. Shown here are the commission members in 1909.

Pulaski County native Milton Pitts Crenchaw, shown here in this 2007 photo, was one of the original Tuskegee Airmen from Arkansas. Crenchaw was also one of the first African Americans in the United States, and the first from Arkansas, to be trained by the federal government as a civilian licensed pilot. During his career, he trained hundreds of cadet pilots and was instrumental in starting the first successful flight training program at Philander Smith College.

The mysterious 1957 disappearance of attorney Maud Crawford, a former associate of U.S. Senator John L. McClellan, was believed by many to be linked to the senator’s investigation of organized crime. However, it is more likely that she met her demise due to her discovery of local fraudulent land deeds. The case of her disappearance has never been solved, and she was declared dead due to foul play in 1969. Shown here is a reward poster seeking assistance in her recovery.

The 1.5-million-volt conical Tesla Coil in operation at the Mid-America Science Museum in Hot Springs (Garland County) is billed as the most powerful in the world. Its inventor, Nikola Tesla, is recognized by many as the “father of electricity.” The museum uses the coil, known as “Caged Lightning,” in a “Sermon from Science” program to educate the general public about Tesla’s work and inventions.

Thomas Pleasant Dockery attained the rank of brigadier general in the Confederate army, commanding Arkansas troops in a number of important engagements on both sides of the Mississippi River. He enjoyed a reputation as a gallant and aggressive commander. Upon his death on February 27, 1898, the Arkansas Gazette observed that Dockery “was a broad-gauged man. He was as brave and gallant a soldier as the Confederacy produced.”

In 1958, Daisy Manufacturing, the producer of the world-famous air gun, moved its Michigan plant to a new state-of-the-art factory in Rogers (Benton County). Eight years later, the company opened a museum to display its gun collection. When Daisy began to outsource manufacturing to Missouri in 1997, the museum’s location at the industrial site was deemed inadequate. The Daisy Airgun Museum was moved to the restored 1886 downtown building shown here and reopened in 2000 at a ribbon-cutting ceremony by Arkansas First Lady Janet Huckabee. On October 25, 2004, the museum was relocated to the corner of 1st and Walnut streets.

Of the seventy-five counties of the state of Arkansas, ten have been named in honor of presidents of the United States. On March 28, 1871, the state legislature named the newest county then to be created in honor of the nation’s sixteenth chief executive, Abraham Lincoln.

An artist of national significance, Natalie Smith Henry made her reputation as an easel painter and muralist during the Depression era. At the height of her career in 1939, the U.S. Department of the Treasury commissioned her to paint a mural for the Springdale (Washington County) post office. In later years, Henry combined her interest in art with her business acumen, managing the Art Institute of Chicago School Store for twenty-three years.

In 1858, Lycurgus Johnson began construction on his plantation home, a two-story, seventeen-room, L-shaped Greek Revival house near the Mississippi River in Chicot County. The house has survived war, floods, and more for almost 150 years. In 1974, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. It was donated to Arkansas State University in 2001, and the university’s Delta Heritage Initiative program oversaw its complete restoration. Lakeport Plantation house was opened to the public on September 29, 2007.

The Memphis-Arkansas Memorial Bridge on Interstate 55 spanning the Mississippi River opened on December 17, 1949. Total cost of the steel structure bridge and accesses totaled $13.6 million. Increased traffic capacity of the bridge, which connects Arkansas with Tennessee at Memphis, greatly contributed to the growth of West Memphis (Crittenden County) as a major trucking center.

Bass Reeves, probably the most famous black law enforcement officer operating in Indian Territory, was an ex-slave who moved to Van Buren (Crawford County) after the Civil War. He signed on as a deputy marshal for Judge Isaac Parker of Fort Smith (Sebastian County) in 1875 and remained in federal service until 1906. Bass, who could not read and so memorized his warrants, was involved in many controversies, including one in which he allowed the corpse of a criminal he had killed to burn in a campfire. After leaving Fort Smith, he served as a police officer in Oklahoma.

Shown here is the entrance to the Arkansas State University Museum located in Jonesboro (Craighead County). The institution that began with four display cases in 1933 has grown into a 21,000-square-foot facility that preserves impressive historic, archaeological, and natural history collections. In 1973, the museum became one of the first in the Southeast to be accredited by the American Association of Museums. Today, it is the largest and most comprehensive museum in northeast Arkansas.

Eddie Hamm of Lonoke (Lonoke County) was perhaps the greatest athlete produced by the state in the first half of the twentieth century. As a track-and-field star, he set many state records, and, at the U.S. Olympic trials in 1928, he set a world record in the long jump. Later that year, at the Olympic Games in Amsterdam, he set the Olympic long-jump record. The flyer shown here promotes Hamm and other athletes the summer following his Olympic triumph.

In 1949, at age fifteen, Sue Kidd became a member of the Springfield Sallies, a team in the professional All-American Girls Baseball League. She had considerable pitching success with three different teams in a career that lasted approximately five years. Her pitching was instrumental in league championships in both 1951 and 1952. Off-season activities included her own traveling All-Star team, which, according to this flyer, played an all-male Heber Springs (Cleburne County) team in 1949.

The town of Sulphur Rock (Independence County) has the distinction of being the site of the nation’s last mule-drawn streetcar. Opening in the late 1880s, the transportation system ran its last route in 1926. Shown here is trolley conductor John “Skipper John” Hudleston, along with Dick the Mule, who pulled the trolley for many of those years.

Camden (Ouachita County) furniture manufacturer and respected coin collector Matthew Rothert Sr. is best known for his efforts to have the phrase “In God We Trust” added to U.S. currency. Rothert eagerly made speeches and wrote letters about his proposal to anyone who would listen. Finally convinced, U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright and others introduced a bill that was signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on July 11, 1955. Rothert received much praise for his efforts and later was chosen as president of the American Numismatic Association.

Robert Brownlee, a skilled stonemason, moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1837 when he learned of the need for masons to help complete construction of the new statehouse, now known as the Old State House. Brownlee worked on several state projects but also made his living by carving objects such as the monument shown here at the gravesite of William Gilchrist, Grandmaster Mason of the Grand Lodge of Arkansas, located in Little Rock’s Mount Holly Cemetery.

William Grant Still, who grew up in Little Rock (Pulaski County), was a nationally and internationally acclaimed composer of symphonic and popular music. As an African American, he broke race barriers and opened opportunities for other minorities. He was a strong advocate for the performance of works by American composers.

Lafayette County is named in honor of the famous Frenchman Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, who came to America to serve as an officer during the Revolutionary War. Attaining the rank of lieutenant general in the Continental Army, he participated in many of the important battles of the war. Returning to his native France after the war, he made a triumphant return to the established United States in 1824–25. Approximately two years later, the new Arkansas county was christened with his name.

El Dorado (Union County) native Lou Brock retired from major league baseball after the 1979 season. Brock began his major league career with the Chicago Cubs in 1962, but it was with the St. Louis Cardinals two years later that he began to make his mark. He helped lead the Cardinals to two World Series championships and was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1985.

The Union County Courthouse, located in El Dorado, was constructed in 1927–28, combining the popular Colonial Revival and Classical styles of architecture. An attractive feature of the building shown here is the large number of Greek Ionic columns that surround the structure. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.

Edward Washbourne is perhaps the most famous artist of antebellum Arkansas. His greatest claim to fame is as the creator of one of the Western frontier’s most memorable genre scenes, The Arkansas Traveler. Born in Pope County in 1831, Washbourne received his first formal art training at Fort Smith (Sebastian County) in 1851. He became well known for traveling the state and painting portraits of the wealthy. He suddenly became ill and died while in Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1860; he is buried in the city’s Mount Holly Cemetery.

Arkansas-born General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Allied Commander, signed the Japanese surrender document on board the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, thus ending World War II. MacArthur, who is seated at the signature table, was born in the Little Rock Barracks on January 26, 1880, and baptized at Christ Episcopal Church. Though he returned to Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1952 and acknowledged his birth site, the war hero had little other contact with his native state.

Arkansas City (Desha County) is a small community located in southeast Arkansas, nestled against a levee that protects it from the Mississippi River. Before the Flood of 1927, the city—which was incorporated in 1872—was a major trade and cultural center and was one of the most important ports on the Mississippi River. By the 1950s, much of the city’s business sector was virtually deserted, with many of the buildings unused.

In the summer of 1955, the Hoxie (Lawrence County) school system became one of the first in Arkansas to integrate. Before integration, black elementary students had attended a local segregated school, while high school students were bused to an all-black school in Jonesboro (Craighead County). One of the black students at Hoxie is seen in this 1956 photo of the eighth-grade girls’ Glee Club.

As soon as Confederate Fort Hindman was surrendered during the 1863 Battle of Arkansas Post, General Stephen Burbridge and members of his staff jumped across a ditch to plant the flag of the United States on the parapet walls. Burbridge is shown here in this stylized engraving holding the flag and encouraging his men.

The Titan II Missile program was a Cold War weapons system featuring fifty-four launch complexes located in three states. Each complex was capable of delivering a nine-megaton nuclear warhead 5,500 miles away. Construction began in 1961 on the first of eighteen complexes located in five Arkansas counties (Faulkner, Conway, White, Van Buren, and Cleburne). A convoy is shown here departing the Little Rock Air Force Base in Pulaski County, taking a Titan II Missile frame to one of those eighteen silos.

Barges, such as the ones shown here loaded with freshwater mussels, helped make Newport (Jackson County) the center of the U.S. freshwater pearl and button market from 1900 to 1920. At the button industry’s peak, one firm required approximately 1,000 fishers to supply the 76,000 pounds of shells processed by the firm each day. The business at its peak also required about 200 button cutters.

In 1972, DeGray Lake Resort State Park opened in Clark and Hot Spring counties. Approximately three years later, one of the park’s top attractions, the ninety-six-room lodge shown here, opened for business.

In 1962, St. Francis County native Sonny Liston became the Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the World. Running away from home at an early age, he became involved in a life of crime in St. Louis, Missouri. He was introduced to boxing while serving prison time. A brief amateur career and a string of impressive professional victories got him the title shot in which he knocked out champion Floyd Patterson. Liston held the title for less than a year, losing to a young Cassius Clay, better known today as Muhammad Ali.

At the time this photograph was taken in the 1980s, Arkansas was home to one governor and five former chief executives. Four of those ex-governors, representing four different decades of service, are shown here with then-governor Bill Clinton. Left to right: Orval Faubus, Bill Clinton, Frank White, Dale Bumpers, and David Pryor. All but Frank White are Democrats, as was the fifth living ex-governor at the time, Sid McMath, who is not shown.

William Hines Furbush, a native of Kentucky, made a brief visit to Helena (Phillips County) during the Civil War. After serving in the Forty-second Colored Infantry, he returned to Phillips County in about 1870. In 1872, he was elected to the Arkansas General Assembly, where he fought for civil rights, among other issues. He was instrumental in the establishment of Lee County and, upon its creation, was elected the county sheriff. He held the office until 1879, when he left the state for Colorado. He died in Marion, Indiana, in 1901 and is buried there.

Governor Harris Flanagin chose the 1836 Hempstead County Courthouse, located in Washington, to serve as the Confederate state capitol after the fall of Little Rock (Pulaski County) to Union forces in 1863. After the war, the building was returned to its former use as the seat of county government. When a new county courthouse was completed in 1874, the old 1836 building served as the town’s school until 1914. Saved from demolition in 1929, the restored structure is a part of the Historic Washington State Park.

After graduating from Hall High School in Little Rock (Pulaski County), Wesley Kanne Clark accepted an appointment to West Point, where he graduated first in his class in 1966. A Vietnam veteran, Clark rose to the rank of four-star general and acted as the Supreme Allied Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe from 1997 to 2000. The political campaign button shown here is from his failed attempt to obtain the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.

As early as 1912, students of the Yale University School of Forestry were making spring field trips to Ashley County to study southern forests. In 1946, the Crossett Lumber Company offered the university a site for a permanent camp. Sleeping quarters, a shower house, and a mess hall, seen in this photo, were built, and Yale Camp was established. For the next twenty years, the camp served as an important site in the development and evolution of professional forestry management.

Shown here is the entrance to the Governor Mike Huckabee Delta Rivers Nature Center near Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). The center’s 13,000-square-foot main building, located on 130 acres, was funded by the 1996 conservation sales tax. The center, which opened in the summer of 2001, is open year round with a mission to educate visitors about the outdoor opportunities in the area.

Shown here is the logo of the All American Red Heads, an all-women basketball team formed in Cassville, Missouri, in 1936. Over the next sixty years, the team won more than seventy percent of their games competing against men. The home base for the team was moved to Caraway (Craighead County) in 1955, where it remained until July 26, 1996. On that day, the team was retired after playing its last game.

Born in Prairie Grove (Washington County) in 1901, Margaret Pittman is known worldwide for her pioneering research in microbiology and immunology of infectious diseases. She is especially recognized for her work in developing a vaccine for whooping cough. Her work, with later improvements, is still the scientific basis for protecting the world’s children against this potentially deadly disease. Pittman died in 1995 and is buried in Prairie Grove Cemetery.

Gene Hatfield was an artist and teacher who works in the media of watercolor, oil, acrylic, and sculpture. His best-known work was the transformation of the yard of his Conway (Faulkner County) home into an art environment using junk and recycled objects. In late 2002, Hatfield’s house and yard were subject to complaints and legal action by public officials. In the end, although not everyone appreciated his creative work, a legal ruling established its legitimacy as art.

With the death of Congressman William Oldfield in 1928, after he had been reelected for his tenth consecutive term, his wife, Fannie Pearl, was chosen to serve the remainder of his term in the Seventieth Congress. Pearl Oldfield was then elected in 1929, becoming the first Arkansas woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. She served a rather uneventful term in the Seventy-first Congress and did not seek reelection.

Vera Key was the first chairperson of a museum commission formed in 1974 at the urging of the Rogers (Benton County) city council. The local history museum that was initiated by the commission, the Rogers Historical Museum, opened in 1975 and has grown into one of the most respected institutions in the state. In 1999, the museum became one of a small number in Arkansas to be accredited by the American Association of Museums.

The IQ Zoo was a popular tourist attraction in Hot Springs (Garland County) from 1954 to 1990. The trained animals demonstrated the principles of scientific research in animal behavior conducted by Dr. Keller Breland and his wife, Marian Breland. Breland-trained animals were the first to appear in television commercials. The handbill shown here promotes the popular Hot Springs attraction.

The Diamond State Chorus is the performance group of the Greater Little Rock Chapter of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Singing in America, Inc. (also known as the Barbershop Harmony Society). The Little Rock Chapter, which was formed in 1955, was known as the Capitol City Chorus until the early 1970s. The award-winning chorus of approximately fifty members performs many concerts each year.

The student body of Mount Ida (Montgomery County) public schools is shown gathered outside the high school reciting the Pledge of Allegiance sometime in the 1930s. Students can clearly be seen performing the traditional salute method, which at the time required the right arm to be extended toward the flag during the recitation. This form of salute was discontinued in 1942.

Harber Theater, a Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) store turned theater in 1912, was located at West 2nd Avenue and Pine Street. The popular theater was remodeled in 1922 but burned to the ground shortly thereafter. Many popular silent movies of the day were screened at the theater. Shown in this 1920s photo is a promotional gimmick by the theater management advertising the screening of the popular serial King of the Circus.

The Dyess Colony Resettlement Area, located on more than 15,000 acres in Mississippi County during the Great Depression, consisted of some 500 homesteads. Designed to assist farm families during the hard times, each homestead included a simple frame house such as the one shown here. All houses were wired for electricity, with the larger five-room structures being supplied with the luxury of indoor plumbing.