February 24, 2012

Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in March 1865 to help four million African Americans in the South make the transition from slavery to freedom and to help destitute white people obtain food and medical supplies in the dire days at the end of the Civil War. The bureau attempted to help Arkansas’s estimated 110,000 slaves become truly free, working out of offices such as the one shown here in Arkadelphia (Clark County).