Photos of the Day

Mississippi native Albert Hibbler moved to the small northeast Arkansas community of Dell (Mississippi County) when he was ten. HIbbler was blind at an early age, and his parents sent him to the Madison Battery School for the Blind in Little Rock (Pulaski County), where he developed a baritone voice with a perfect pitch. By age twenty, he was touring the country with different bands. In 1943, he joined the Duke Ellington Band and rose to fame. After eight years, he left Ellington to pursue a solo career. In 1955 and 1956, he had five songs on the Billboard pop chart. Hibbler was also the first African American to have a radio show broadcast from Little Rock.

By the outbreak of the Civil War, Samuel Maxey, a native of Kentucky, had immigrated to Texas, where he became active in raising a Confederate regiment. A West Point graduate, Maxey was later commissioned as a brigadier general and placed in command of the Indian Territory in 1863. On April 18, 1864, he led a Confederate military force that included Native Americans to a bloody victory at the Engagement at Poison Spring. Many Confederate soldiers, including Maxey’s Indian troops, were suspected of committing atrocities against African-American Union troops involved in the engagement.

The tarantula, which appeared in Arkansas about 8,000 years ago, is the largest spider known to inhabit the state. The spiders are found in most areas of the state, with the exception of the Delta. Their distribution is shown here in this map of the state.

Within approximately seven years after the end of World War I, Armistice Day was being celebrated as a holiday across the United States. In 1938, the day set aside, November 11, to recognize the ending of the war became a national holiday. Shown here in this 1941 photograph of Clarksville (Johnson County) is a typical Armistice Day parade. In 1954, the observance became known as Veteran’s Day, a time to honor all of America’s veterans.

This aerial view of a modern rice harvest near Stuttgart (Arkansas County) illustrates how far rice farming has developed from Arkansas County’s first rice crop, planted by W. E. Hope as an experiment in 1902. Within five years, production of the crop greatly expanded, with profits of a local rice mill exceeding $15,000. From those humble beginnings, Arkansas County has become one of the leading rice-producing areas in the world.

Between 1890 and 1950, White County became the center of strawberry cultivation in the United States. By 1935, local farmer A. W. Hoofman was shipping out approximately six million plants a year to every state in the Union, as well as several foreign countries. Before its decline in the 1950s, the strawberry business had grown into a $1.6 million-a-year enterprise. One of the more than 1,500 county train loads a year can be seen in this 1918 photo of wagon loads of berries being brought to the Judsonia (White County) train station for shipment.

In 1825, War of 1812 general George Izard was appointed the second territorial governor of Arkansas. During his approximately three-year administration, he was credited with organizing the territorial government into a more efficient and effective institution. Within a few months of his arrival in Arkansas, a new county was named in his honor. Izard died in Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1828 and is buried in the capital city’s Mount Holly Cemetery.

The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) was a fraternal society for Union veterans. The first GAR posts (chapters) originated in Illinois around 1865. At the society’s peak, more than 100 GAR posts were formed across Arkansas. Across the nation, many monuments commemorating the role of the members of the GAR in the war were erected. Only three such monuments were erected in Arkansas: one in Siloam Springs (Benton County), another in Gentry (Benton County), and this one erected in 1894 at Evergreen Cemetery in Judsonia (White County).

Buddhism is one of the newest and smallest religions in terms of numbers established in Arkansas. It was introduced to the United States in the early nineteenth century, and its adherents number less than one percent of the total population of Arkansas. While small, it is also one of the fastest growing. Shown here is the Chua Pho Minh Temple, located in a residential neighborhood in Fort Smith (Sebastian County).

“Sundown towns,” communities in which African Americans were not welcome, were fairly common in Arkansas during much of the first half of the twentieth century. Towns sometimes advertised the absence of African Americans as a draw for new settlement. Shown here is an early twentieth-century advertisement for the town of Siloam Springs (Benton County) proclaiming “no negroes.”

Fayetteville (Washington County) native Edward Durell Stone became one of the foremost architects of the mid-twentieth century. Stone attended a number of schools, including the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville, but never obtained a degree. He designed a number of buildings in Arkansas and around the world and developed an international reputation with his designs. Here, he can be seen standing to the right of his friend Senator J. W. Fulbright outside the entrance to one of his most well-known buildings, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC.

On March 18, 1927, a devastating tornado tore a path through Green Forest (Carroll County), killing nineteen citizens and injuring many more. Much of the town’s business section was destroyed or severely damaged, as shown here. A local church served as a hospital and a morgue during the town’s cleanup and recovery.

The Top of the Rock Chorus is the Little Rock (Pulaski County) chapter of Sweet Adelines International, the female barbershop singing group. The chorus was formed on February 7, 1961. The group was originally called Little Rock Chorus and was renamed Top of the Rock Chorus in the 1980s. It is composed of about sixty women who compete annually in regional competitions against other female choruses and quartets. The group is shown here in a 2011 competition.

Shown here is the Quapaw Treaty of 1824, upon which fifteen Quapaw chiefs and warriors placed their mark or signature, thereby agreeing to its provisions. Under the treaty, the Quapaw were relocated along the Red River in present-day Louisiana. After several crop-destroying floods, many of the displaced Quapaw returned to Arkansas, while others remained at their new homes never to return.

In 1949, in recognition of the relief efforts by the United States after World War II, France organized an appreciation program known as the Merci Train. Forty-nine boxcars loaded with gifts were delivered to the United States. J. N. Heiskell, Arkansas Merci Train committee member and editor of the Arkansas Gazette, is shown here examining the car delivered to Arkansas.

In 1895, Elias Camp Morris became the first president of the National Baptist Convention, the largest denomination of black Christians in the United States. He held the post until his death in 1922. In 1877, Camp moved to Helena (Phillips County), where, two years later, he became an ordained Baptist minister. Also active in local business and Republican Party politics, he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention on several occasions.

Parnell Hall on the campus of the Arkansas School for the Deaf in Little Rock (Pulaski County) was built in 1931 and is on the National Register of Historic Places. The building is an example of Classical Revival-style architecture and, over the years, has been used for classrooms, a gymnasium, an auditorium, a chapel, and a library.

Lena Lowe Jordan was an African-American registered nurse and hospital administrator who managed Arkansas Home and Hospital for Crippled Negro Children in Little Rock (Pulaski County), which by 1938 had become a general hospital for black patients named the Lena Jordan Hospital. In addition, she began a unique training program for young black women who wanted to become practical nurses.

While learning a second language has become a greater priority for students in the twenty-first century, language classes have long been a major component of public education in many Arkansas schools. Seen in this 1963 photograph are students of Southern State College, now Southern Arkansas University (SAU), in Magnolia (Columbia County) being instructed in the school’s state-of-the-art language laboratory.

Batesville (Independence County) lawyer and politician Fent Noland is best known as a humorist because of letters he published in the nationally known The Spirit of the Times. Noland, shown here in uniform, also had an unsuccessful military career. His dismissal from West Point in 1825 originally brought him to Arkansas. After killing the governor’s nephew in a duel, he left the territory and returned to the military. Growing angry at being passed over for promotion, he left the army, returning to Arkansas by 1836.

Potts Inn was constructed in the late 1850s by John Kirkbride Potts, the patriarch of the founding family of Pottsville (Pope County). The house, with its nine fireplaces and two and a half stories, was built about the same time as the Butterfield Overland Express was being developed. The Potts house was selected as a stop on the Memphis to Fort Smith to California route. The restored inn serves as a museum.

One of the many historic documents housed in the Southwest Regional Archives–located at Historic Washington State Park in the old 1870s county courthouse–is this 1825 county receipt recording that James Black was paid the sum of one dollar for serving on a Hempstead County grand jury. Black, a Washington resident, is believed by many to have manufactured the first bowie knife.

The Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad (M&NA) was a regional carrier that, at its peak, stretched from Neosho, Missouri, to Helena (Phillips County). The railroad was plagued with weather-induced disasters, periods of labor unrest, questionable decisions by absentee managers and owners, unforgiving topography, poor economic conditions, fires, and bad luck. Organized as the M&NA in 1906, it existed for only four decades.

Izard County native Vada Sheid won her first political office as Baxter County treasurer in 1960. She quickly moved up the Arkansas political ladder and was elected to the Arkansas House of Representatives in 1965. In 1976, she became the first woman elected to the Arkansas Senate without succeeding a deceased husband who held the position. She held the office until defeated in 1985. Among her political accomplishments were being involved with the construction of two bridges across Lake Norfork and introducing the measure that created North Arkansas Community College.

On September 12, 1906, the Nashvile News of Howard County reported that John Huddleston of neighboring Pike County, who had recently discovered diamonds on his farm, had been offered $36,000 for the property. Today, parts of that same diamond-bearing land are included in the popular Crater of Diamonds State Park.

The Ozark Folk Center State Park in Mountain View (Stone County), a facility that preserves Ozark heritage, opened in 1973. Interest in such a facility was sparked by the success of the Arkansas Folk Festival, which had begun in 1963. Construction began in 1971, three years after Congressman Wilbur Mills was able to secure a $2.5 million grant, and the total cost of construction was $3.4 million. Twenty-four craft demonstration areas designed to showcase and preserve the crafts and folkways of the local Ozark culture are the main draw of the park.

Jefferson County native Thase Daniel, a world-renowned nature photographer, shot almost a quarter of a million images in a career that lasted approximately thirty years. Daniel traveled the world on photo shoots and saw her work published in many of the leading magazines of the day. By the time of her death in 1990, she was considered one of the world’s leading wildlife and nature photographers. She is shown here in this circa 1975 photograph on a shoot in a swamp.

Smithville was the first county seat of present-day Lawrence County. Incorporated on January 10, 1851, the town was once a thriving trading center near the Strawberry River in the foothills of the extreme eastern Ozarks region. As Smithville headed into the twenty-first century, major highways, super centers, and major retail chains in larger towns and cities proved detrimental. In July 2008, Davis Discount General Store, then the town’s last full-time business, closed its doors.

The building that houses the Greenwood Museum (Sebastian County) is known by most locals as the Old Jail. Constructed of local stone in 1892, the four-cell, two-story building was constructed with walls two feet thick. Being one of the oldest surviving structures in the town, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. It has served as a repository of the town history since 1966.

Greene County native Paul Douglas was one of America’s most decorated pilots. During World War II, he flew 136 missions and helped develop the P-47 Thunderbolt, shown here, into one of the most efficient fighter planes. Douglas retired from the service with the rank of brigadier general in 1970.

The Cherokee leader Sequoyah, using a name given to him by missionaries, was sometimes known as George Guess or Gist. He is best known for developing a Cherokee syllabary that transcribed the Cherokee spoken sounds into written form. He lived in Arkansas for a few years in the 1820s, and his syllabary resulted in the publication of a bilingual Cherokee newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, in 1828 in New Echota, Georgia. Sequoyah left Arkansas for the Indian Territory by the late 1820s and died while on a trip to Mexico in 1843. The hand-colored lithograph shown here was made circa 1836.

In 1915, John Brinkley passed the Arkansas Eclectic Medical Board examination, licensing him in the use of such medicine as herbal remedies. He practiced in Kansas for about fifteen years before his license was revoked for questionable practices. After some time in Texas, he set up practice in two locations in Little Rock (Pulaski County), one being the Brinkley Hospital shown here. His career began to unravel when his male virility treatments were exposed as frauds in 1939. After several lawsuits, he filed for bankruptcy in 1941.

Bentonville (Benton County) native Louise Thaden is shown here in the early 1920s before she attained fame as a female aviator. During her nearly ten-year competitive aviation career, she set altitude, endurance, and speed records. In 1936, she became the first woman to win the Bendix Transcontinental Air Race. In 1951, the Bentonville municipal airport was named in her honor.

Located seven miles south of Saltillo, Mexico, is this large stone monument commemorating the February 1847 Battle of Buena Vista. The Mexican War battle, which was a U.S. victory, made General Zachary Taylor a national hero. Among the U.S. troops participating in the victory was part of the regiment from Arkansas. Archibald Yell, colonel of the regiment, was killed on the field at Buena Vista.

When the state legislature passed Act 476 of 2001, the Dutch oven became the state’s Official State Historic Cooking Vessel. The oven was brought to Arkansas in early territorial days and, by the mid-1800s, was in widespread use. Expert John Ragsdale is shown here demonstrating Dutch oven cooking at the Ozark Folk Center in Mountain View (Stone County) in 1988.

The Gann Museum of Saline County is located in the only building in the nation known to be constructed of bauxite. The building, built in 1893, became the office of Dr. Dewell Gann Sr. His patients who could not afford to pay for his services built it for him. Dr. Gann’s son gave the building to the city in 1946, and, in 1980, it was converted into a museum that houses a large collection of Arkansas artifacts. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.

In 1879, Edwin Curtiss, working for Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, conducted what is considered to be the first scientific archaeological excavation in the state. During his trip, he spent eighty-six days in eastern Arkansas along the St. Francis River, collecting almost 1,000 pots and hundreds of other objects. While there, he made this drawing of the Stanly Mounds at what is today Parkin Archeological State Park.

The Van Dorn Pattern flag, designed by Confederate major general Earl Van Dorn, was just one of the variety of flags carried by Arkansas troops during the Civil War. The flag shown here belonged to the Northwest Fifteenth Regiment Arkansas Volunteer Infantry. It is preserved in the collection of the Old State House Museum.

Willie K. Hocker became a notable Arkansas figure when, in 1912, she won a statewide contest conducted by the Secretary of State’s Office to design a state flag. Some suspicion arose due to the fact that she was a member of the Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), the group that had proposed the designing of a flag. However, all entries were submitted with designer identification separate from the entry. Her design, with some modifications, is the flag the state flies today. In 2005, a marker was placed at her grave, honoring her accomplishments.

The Museum of the Arkansas Grand Prairie, founded in Stuttgart (Arkansas County) in 1974, includes five outbuildings and a 20,000-square-foot main exhibit hall that interprets the history of the area. Included in the museum’s approximately 15,000 artifacts are these mechanical musical instruments and gramophones.

When visitors arrived at the northwest Arkansas resort town of Monte Ne, they were transported to their hotel rooms across a man-made lagoon in a gondola imported from Venice. Several area springs were dammed to create the lagoons. Monte Ne, the project of William “Coin” Harvey, was one of the most popular destinations in northwest Arkansas in the early twentieth century. However, interest in the resort declined by the late 1920s, and much of the property was foreclosed. Harvey died and was buried there in 1936. Much of what remains of the resort rests under the waters of Beaver Lake.

In 1990, Melanie and Jim Bowles adopted and cared for the first of what would become hundreds of abused horses over the years. Two years later, the couple founded Proud Spirit Horse Sanctuary in Florida. In 2004, the award-winning, nationally recognized sanctuary was moved to a 320-acre facility near Mena (Polk County), where it is operated by the couple and their family.

On January 7, 2003, Mark Pryor was sworn in as Arkansas’s thirty-third U.S. senator. Just months before, Pryor had defeated incumbent Tim Hutchinson, the man who occupied the seat that was once occupied by Pryor’s highly respected father, David Pryor. Previously, the Democratic junior senator had served in the Arkansas House of Representatives and as the state’s attorney general. He lost his U.S. Senate seat to Republican Tom Cotton in 2014.

When John Heiskell assumed the position of editor-in-chief of the Arkansas Gazette at the turn of the twentieth century, many changes were made to reinvigorate the paper. Included in those changes was the construction of a three-story building at 3rd and Louisiana streets in Little Rock (Pulaski County), shown here in 1960, to house the paper’s operations. It served this purpose until the paper closed in 1991. In 1993, it was the site of the national headquarters of the Bill Clinton for President Campaign.

In July 1930, Russell R. Reynolds, a recent forestry graduate of the University of Michigan, was hired by the Southern Forest Experiment Station of the United States Department of Agriculture to conduct inventories and to assist southern Arkansas landowners in developing plans for sustainable forests. In 1934, he became the first project leader for the Crossett Experimental Forest.

Louisiana-born Bill Dickey, considered by many to be the greatest catcher in baseball, grew up in Kensett (White County) and Little Rock (Pulaski County). Dickey played and coached at a time (1920s-1960s) when his team, the New York Yankees, dominated the world of baseball by winning seventeen American League titles and fourteen World Series titles. He counted among his friends Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Dickey was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1954 and, in 1959, was one of the first five sports figures to be inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame.

In 2004, thoroughbred horse Smarty Jones was making racing news on a regular basis. Named after Milly “Smarty Jones” McNair, the mother-in-law of co-owner Pat Chapman, the three-year-old was sent to Oaklawn Park Racetrack in Hot Springs (Garland County) in 2004. There, he won three major races including the Arkansas Derby, which qualified him for the Kentucky Derby, which he also won. After winning the Preakness, Jones fell one victory short of winning the fabled Triple Crown. Jones was retired shortly afterward, ending a stellar career of eight wins and one place.

The small Poinsett County city of Marked Tree was incorporated on July 8, 1897. It was named for an oak tree growing on the bank of the Little River marked with a foot-high “M.” Some believe that the mark was made by Native Americans, while others believe it was created by an outlaw band in the 1830s. When this photo of Main Street was taken in the mid-1903s the city had a population of more than 2,000.

The Ozark Folk Center State Park in Mountain View (Stone County), the only facility in the United States that preserves Ozark heritage, opened in 1973. The main draw of the park is the collection of twenty-four craft demonstration areas designed to showcase and preserve the crafts and folkways of the local Ozark culture. Shown here is the blacksmith demonstration area.

Many Greek immigrants began arriving in Arkansas in the late nineteenth century at a time when parts of northern Greece were still under the domination of Turkish Ottoman rule. In the years just before the outbreak of World War I, many Arkansas Greeks, including Harry Hronas (shown here in this 1940s photo), returned to their homeland to fight for freedom from the Ottoman Turks in the Balkan Wars. Combat veteran Hronas safely returned to his adopted home in Little Rock (Pulaski County), where he operated a successful business for many years.