Photos of the Day - Starting with N

The presidential campaign of 1960 was hotly contested in Arkansas. Many Arkansans campaigned for the Democratic ticket of Kennedy/Johnson, including this group of young women who show their support for the ticket by wearing their “Kennedy Girls” uniform, which was made popular at the National Democratic Convention. Such efforts were successful, as Kennedy collected almost fifty-one percent of the Arkansas vote.

When the Civil War erupted in 1861, railroad agent Samuel Fordyce, shown here in about 1870 with his wife, Susan, enlisted in the First Ohio Volunteer Cavalry. During his military service, he participated in many actions. Years after the war, he visited Hot Springs (Garland County), seeking the benefits of the waters for his many wartime injuries. Recognizing the potential financial benefits of the springs, he became a leading force in the development of the area into a major health resort. Today, the bathhouse that serves as the visitor center of Hot Springs National Park bears his name.

The northwest Arkansas planned community of Bella Vista (Benton County) began in 1915 when William Baker developed a summer resort on land he and his wife owned. Two years later, the Bakers sold the fledgling resort to the Linebarger brothers of Dallas, Texas, who sold lots for summer homes. Early success was tempered by changing vacation habits, the Great Depression, and World War II. The property was sold in 1952 and again in 1965, this time to developer John Cooper, who developed the area into a recreational retirement community that today has grown to over 17,000 residents. Shown here is a circa 1930s roadside sign.

The wild turkey was once one of the most abundant fowl in the Arkansas woods, but the coming of the railroad in the late 1800s harmed the turkey population. Destruction of habitat was a major factor, but the railroad also exposed the birds for market hunting. The railroad exported thousands of the turkeys, making them a staple of the dinner table in many large cities. By the early 1900s, about the time these two Montgomery County hunters took these birds, the wild turkey had been driven to near extinction.

Bob Cowley Riley overcame debilitating war injuries to serve with distinction as a politician and educator. His political career spanned four decades. In 1970, he was elected to the first of two terms as lieutenant governor (1971–1975). Riley served eleven days as governor in 1975 after Governor Dale Bumpers vacated the office to take his recently won seat in the U.S. Senate.

Madison County citizens view a 1907 Sunday morning train wreck a quarter of a mile north of the town of Johnson. A rain-weakened roadbed was the cause of the derailment of all cars but the engine. Steaming on to Fayetteville (Washington County), the engine soon returned with a passenger coach to transport the injured back to Fayetteville for medical attention. There were no fatalities.

Christ of the Ozarks is a statue located in Eureka Springs (Carroll County) on top of Magnetic Mountain. The white mortar figure of Jesus Christ is seven stories tall and weighs almost two million pounds (about 540 tons). The statue is one of five giant statues of Christ in the world and one of only two in North America. It was sculpted by Emmet A. Sullivan and funded by the Elna M. Smith Foundation. The statue, which has loyal fans and vehement detractors, continues to be a major source of conflict in and outside of Eureka Springs.

Veteran film and television actress Betty May Adams grew up in Little Rock (Pulaski County) and attended Little Rock Junior College, now the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. In 1946, she moved to California to pursue acting, landing her first role as an uncredited actress in the 1949 film Red, Hot and Blue. By 1954, movie producers had changed her name to Julia and cast her in what would become her best-known film, the 3-D classic, Creature from the Black Lagoon. This photo is a publicity still for that movie. Approximately a year later, her name was changed to Julie. She has appeared in more than 100 films and television productions.

The Ozark Heritage Arts Center and Museum, located in Leslie (Searcy County), actively collects, exhibits, and shares the musical, cultural, and historical heritage of the Ozarks region. The center, shown here, is located in a former high school gym constructed by the Works Progress Administration in 1938. Abandoned in 1986, the building was restored and reopened as the arts center in 1990.

Greenbrier is a small town in Faulkner County twelve miles north of Conway (Faulkner County) on Highway 65. At the time of its incorporation on April 5, 1880, the town had a population of about 300 citizens. By 1905, the town’s business district included eight general stores, two additional grist mills, a steam sawmill, and a shingle mill. Also among the early businesses was the McCracken Drug Store, shown here at the turn of the twentieth century.

The imperial moth (Eacles imperialis) is just one of the estimated 2,500 to 3,000 moths that inhabit or visit the state of Arkansas. The colorful moth, such as this one spotted at Mount Magazine State Park, can grow to have a wingspan of almost seven inches.

Author, farmer, teacher, philanthropist, and patron of the arts Lily Peter was born in 1891 near the Phillips County town of Marvell. A self-made millionaire, Peter personally paid for a Little Rock (Pulaski County) performance of the Philadelphia Philharmonic Orchestra. She published several books of poetry, and she was appointed the state poet laureate in 1971.

Dick Powell, C. G. “Crip” Hall, and Bob Burns pose for a Paramount Studios photographer; circa 1940. Powell was born in Mountain View (Stone County) and starred in musicals and dramas. Hall served as Arkansas’s secretary of state from 1937 to 1961. Burns was born in Greenwood (Sebastian County) and starred as a comedian in radio programs and movies.

The economy of Calhoun County did not recover from the devastation of the Civil War until the coming of the railroad in the 1880s. The new transportation system jump-started the harvesting of virgin timber in the county. Logging crews such as the one shown here were part of an industry that produced an estimated thirty-six million board feet of lumber by 1890.

Maya Angelou was an internationally renowned bestselling author, poet, actor, and political activist. An inductee into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame, she held more than fifty honorary university degrees and was known throughout the world as a spokesperson for human rights, freedom, and justice. Her first published book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), was an autobiographical account of her childhood, including the ten years she lived in Stamps (Lafayette County) with her grandmother.

In 1991, the National Civil Rights Museum opened in Memphis, Tennessee. The museum is built around the Lorraine Motel, the site of the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Many dignitaries attended the museum’s dedication that year, including Governor Bill Clinton. He is shown here escorting civil rights leader Daisy Bates on a tour of the museum galleries.

Little Rock (Pulaski County) native Gil Gerard first appeared on film as an extra in the 1970 movie Love Story. The brief exposure helped launch a career in commercials; he appeared in more than 400. He also did a two-year stint on the soap opera The Doctors. However, his greatest success came as the lead in the late 1970s movie and television series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

Dardanelle, the seat of Yell County, was incorporated in 1855. The town, shown here in the 1950s, became one of the rapidly growing settlements along the Arkansas River. The source of the name is in dispute: quite possibly, the land reminded early explorers of the Dardanelles in Turkey, or perhaps it was named after the holder of a Spanish land grant in the area, Jean Baptiste Dardenne.

Ouachita County native Benjamin T. Laney was a rather obscure figure in Arkansas politics until he was elected governor in 1944. As the state’s thirty-third governor, his greatest legacy was the 1945 Revenue Stabilization Law, which created a single general fund from which all state appropriations were made. It also prohibited deficit spending and required the state to operate on a balanced budget.

Carnall Hall, named in honor of an associate professor of English and modern languages at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville (Washington County), was the first young women’s dormitory on the university campus. Constructed in 1906, the building served as a dorm until 1967 when it became a fraternity house. In the early twenty-first century it was marked for demolition, but instead it was saved and restored. Today, it serves as a restaurant and hotel.

In 1829, President Andrew Jackson appointed prominent Kentucky politician John Pope the territorial governor of Arkansas. As governor, Pope promoted migration and economic development and worked to rid the area of its violent reputation. Pope was appointed to a second term, but in 1835, due to a disagreement with President Jackson, he was replaced by William Futon, the last territorial governor. Pope returned to Kentucky, where he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He died at age seventy-two in 1845.

Best known as the football coach and athletic director at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), John “Barnie” Barnhill was also an accomplished college football player. 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 in 1971.

Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas from 1955 to 1967, is shown with a watermelon from Hope (Hempstead County); circa 1965. Hope claims the title of “Home of the World’s Largest Watermelons.” Hope annually celebrates this distinction with a yearly watermelon festival. The event first originated in 1926 and has been ongoing, though not continuous, since 1977. A four-day event the second week in August, it is sponsored by the Hope-Hempstead County Chamber of Commerce. Activities include watermelon-eating and seed-spitting contests, fiddling, arm wrestling contests, and as many as 200 vendors displaying their wares.

Segregation of the races by law began in the late 1800s and continued well into the 1960s in the United States. All public facilities, including theaters, restaurants, water fountains, and railroad station waiting rooms, were segregated with clearly marked signs. Shown here is the door from the Springdale (Washington County) railroad depot constructed in 1923.

The Wilburn Brothers were among the most successful and influential sibling duos in the country music industry during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. Brothers Virgil Doyle (“Doyle”) Wilburn and Thurman Theodore (“Teddy”) Wilburn, who hailed from Hardy (Sharp County), were stars of the Grand Ole Opry, recording artists with more than thirty albums, recipients of the only “Lifetime Recording Contract” ever given by Decca Records, and hosts of their own nationally syndicated country music show for eleven years.

In 1956, Jim Dryden moved his Dryden Pottery from Kansas to a new location in Hot Springs (Garland County), joined by his son and other family members and artisans. Dryden Pottery has been in continuous operation since opening, turning out thousands of pieces of pottery. Over the years, production has switched from moldware, such as the kiln-ready pieces shown in this 1960s photo, to one-of-a-kind, wheel-thrown originals.

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. 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.

Henderson State University’s Arkansas Hall located in Arkadelphia (Clark County) was dedicated in the spring of 2004. The two-story building houses a 965-seat auditorium, as well as a 162-seat studio theater, dance studio, television studio, classrooms, and offices for the theater arts and communications departments.

Large Standing Figure: Knife Edge, a bronze sculpture created by world-renowned British artist Henry Moore, was purchased by the Metrocentre Commission of Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1978 and placed at Main Street and Capitol Avenue in an attempt to attract people to the new downtown pedestrian mall. In 1999, after the mall failed to attract visitors, the sculpture was moved to Capitol Avenue and Louisiana Street.

Among the many restored buildings at Historic Washington State Park in Hempstead County is the former 1836 Hempstead County Courthouse. With the evacuation of Little Rock (Pulaski County) by Confederate forces in 1863, the building served as the Confederate state seat of government until the end of the Civil War in 1865.

Newark (Independence County) had a population of approximately 300 when this photo was taken in 1903. The town came into existence when railroad interests sought to avoid yearly flooding of the White River by laying new tracks on higher ground. It was officially incorporated in 1889, though the naming of the town remains a mystery.

When renowned Australian-born soprano star Marjorie Lawrence was stricken with polio in 1941, her husband rushed her to Hot Springs (Garland County) for the healing baths. The couple remained there for most of the rest of their lives. After extensive rehabilitation, she was able to return to the Metropolitan Opera and her career in 1942, singing from a couch. She died in 1979 and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Hot Springs.

The Marine Corps Legacy Museum, located on the town square in Harrison (Boone County), opened on November 10, 2001, the 226th birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps. Exhibits throughout the museum depict the history of the Marine Corps from 1775 to the present. The museum staff also provides educational outreach programs to local students. Today, it is one of only two U.S. Marine museums in the United States not located on a military base. Its location makes U.S. Marine history more accessible to non-military personnel.

Several of Arkansas’s seventy-five counties are named in honor of military veterans. One such county is Lawrence County, which was formed in 1815, originally as part of the Missouri Territory. The county was named for War of 1812 naval hero James Lawrence, who, as captain of the ship Chesapeake, was mortally wounded in an 1813 naval engagement with the English ship HMS Shannon. Lawrence is perhaps best remembered for his exclamation, “Don’t give up the ship,” although those may not have been his exact words.

Gail Davis was an Arkansas-born actress who starred as the legendary sharpshooter in the groundbreaking television western series Annie Oakley, which ran from 1954 through 1956. She appeared in thirty-two feature films, was a guest on a number of TV shows, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, was inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame, and was a role model for young women.

In 1857, Congress awarded a six-year contract worth $600,000 to John Butterfield to build, within one year, a mail route from the Mississippi River to California. When the Butterfield Overland Stage Route was completed, the 141-station, 2,812-mile stagecoach/mail route was the longest in the world. Entering Arkansas from Missouri and Tennessee, the first coach stop in Arkansas on the inaugural trip was at a spring near present-day Rogers (Benton County), with Butterfield himself as a passenger. The route was ultimately a financial failure, and by 1860, Butterfield was forced out of the company due to debt.

The face of Rosemary “Snooky” Fisher, accomplished artist, potter, and wife of cartoonist George Fisher, is recognized by few people in Arkansas. However, her name is a different story. In 1976, George Fisher became the chief editorial cartoonist for the Arkansas Gazette. At about the same time, he began to insert his wife’s nickname into his work. It took approximately a year before anyone noticed this inside joke. From that moment of discovery, it became the daily quest for Fisher fans to find the word “Snooky” in his cartoons.

Arkansas has been labeled the “duck-hunting capital of the world.” The ducks held by these two hunters in the 1940s were harvested from present-day Bayou Meto Wildlife Management Area. Located in Arkansas and Jefferson counties, the area was acquired by the state in 1948 and is one of the largest such areas in the United States.

A visitor to many of the small towns of Arkansas will discover that one of the oldest buildings in the community is often the railroad depot, such as the depot shown here in Bearden (Ouachita County) in 1983. In the days of passenger trains, any town of modest size was usually home to such a structure. Over the years, as passenger service declined, many of the buildings were closed and left to decay. Fortunately, a number of them have survived. Some have been restored and house museums, city offices, or private businesses.

In 1985, Madison County native Joseph Floyd “Arky” Vaughan was posthumously inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. The nine-time All Star Team shortstop hit a lifetime average of .318 and hit .300 or better in ten of his approximately sixteen years in the major leagues. Vaughan, who is shown here sliding into base, drowned in a boating accident in 1952.

Arkansas received much national attention when Senator Joseph T. Robinson was the vice-presidential running mate for Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Al Smith in 1928. Shown here stretched across a street in New York City are banners promoting the election of the two politicians.

When Little Rock (Pulaski County) hosted the national United Confederate Veterans Reunion over a three-day period in 1911, more than 12,000 veterans and 140,000 spectators visited the city of less than 50,000. Providing entertainment for such a crowd was a major challenge for the organizers of the event. While the parade of veterans was the climax of the entertainment, many other activities were available, such as exciting rides in the hot air balloon seen here grounded at City Park, now MacArthur Park.

Few gave Republican candidate Frank White much chance when he entered the race for governor in 1980. A little over seven months later, he narrowly defeated the incumbent Bill Clinton. White is shown here sitting at his desk in the governor’s office.

When North Little Rock (Pulaski County) native Mary Medearis attempted to enroll in a speech class at Columbia University, she discovered that the class was full and was forced to take a creative writing class. A class writing assignment later developed into her award-winning book Big Doc’s Girl. Making the New York Times bestseller list and picked as one of the top ten best books of 1942, it remained in continuous print until 1981. It has gone in and out of print in the years since then but is still in print as of 2010.

Benjamin Bogard was one of the leading fundamentalist Christians in the first half of the twentieth century. Coming to Arkansas in 1899, he served as the pastor of several churches before settling at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Little Rock (Pulaski County), where he stayed for almost thirty years. As a member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and several fundamentalist organizations, he led the movement for the passage of a law to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools. Passed in 1928, the law stayed in effect until 1968.

Although Edsel Ford did not arrive in the Arkansas Ozarks until the age of eleven, he lived most of his adult life in the region, consistently incorporated its culture into his writing, and became one of its most distinguished poets. At the time of his death, at the age of forty-one in 1970, he was a well-established regional poet who was beginning to earn national literary attention. Shown here is the cover for his 1961 book A Thicket of Sky.

In 1820, Cephas Washburn helped found Dwight Mission in Pope County, the first Protestant effort directed at the education and conversion of Native Americans in Arkansas. As superintendent of the mission, Washburn assisted many displaced Cherokee who had ventured to Arkansas. The posthumous publication of his Reminiscences of the Indians in 1869 provides valuable information about pioneer days in Arkansas.

The Capital Hotel in Little Rock (Pulaski County), the city’s premier hotel, touted the most luxurious accommodations in the capital city when it opened in 1877. The landmark, which is shown here in 1892, saw a steady decline in the twentieth century until it was restored to its former glory in the 1980s.

On October 7, 2002, Governor Mike Huckabee announced that the design submitted for the new state quarter by Dortha Scott of Mount Ida (Montgomery County) had been selected as the winner of the statewide contest that had received 9,320 entries. The U.S. Treasury Department announced in 1997 that fifty state quarters would be minted and released at a rate of five a year for the next ten years. The contest for the Arkansas design began in January 2001 and closed on March 31. Scott, who was awarded $1,000 for her design, was present when the quarter, the twenty-fifth in the series, was officially released at a ceremony in Murfreesboro (Pike County) on October 20, 2003. A total of 457,800,000 were minted and released by the U.S. Treasury Department.

Before the creation of the St. Francis Levee/Drainage District in 1893 and the delivery of massive dredge equipment such as the dredgeboat shown here in 1912, Mississippi County was described as a “hopeless permanent mosquito and malaria infested swamp.” Perhaps as much as ninety percent of the county was such a swamp with only about ten percent cultivatable. With the land drained, farm acreage increased considerably, and the instances of malaria sharply dropped almost immediately.