April 17, 2010

After a thirty-year political career, John Sebastian Little—his middle name having been derived from the fact that he was the first male child born in the new Sebastian County—became Arkansas’s twenty-first governor. Unfortunately, shortly after his inauguration in 1907, he suffered a mental and physical collapse. When the governor did not recover, new president pro tempore of the Senate X. O. Pindall served as acting governor for almost all of Little’s term. In 1916, Little died while a patient at the Arkansas State Hospital for Nervous Diseases.