Days in AR History - Starting with J

Little Rock (Pulaski County) native Florence Price, the first African-American female composer to have a symphonic composition performed by a major American symphony orchestra, died in Chicago, Illinois. Her Symphony in E Minor had been performed on June 15, 1933, by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Frederick Stock. In her lifetime, Price composed more than 300 works, ranging from small teaching pieces for piano to large-scale compositions such as symphonies and concertos. Price’s Southern heritage had an obvious impact on her work, as the titles for some of her shorter works suggest: Arkansas Jitter, Bayou Dance, and Dance of the Cotton Blossoms.

Frank Stanford, who became one of the most recognized and prolific poets of his generation, died at the age of twenty-nine from self-inflicted gunshot wounds after having confessed infidelity to his wife. Stanford had suffered from depression and had threatened suicide previously. Born on the Mississippi side of the Delta, Stanford entered Subiaco Academy near Paris (Logan County) and later attended the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County). His poetry was published widely in journals and magazines and, in 1977, he published a 15,283-line poem that was highly praised, drawing comparisons with Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn. He is buried in Saint Benedictine Cemetery near Subiaco Abbey.

Armed officers surrounded the Ginter house four miles north of Smithville (Lawrence County), where militant tax-protester and Posse Comitatus member Gordon Kahl was being harbored after he had engaged in a deadly shootout with federal marshals in Medina, North Dakota, on February 13. Lawrence County sheriff Gene Matthews, U.S. deputy marshal Jim A. Hall, and Arkansas state trooper Ed Fitzpatrick entered the house after apprehending Leo Ginter. Matthews was struck with a fatal blast from Kahl’s rifle. The officers, including Matthews, got out, and a rifle barrage and tear gas were fired into the house. The house burned down, and Kahl’s remains were later discovered. What became known as the “Smithville Shootout” made national headlines.

William Allen Clark, one of Arkansas’s “preacher-editors,” died. For nearly fifteen years, he occupied the editorial chair of one of Arkansas’s largest denominational newspapers, the old Arkansas Baptist, and was a pivotal figure in the Landmark Baptist movement within the state. Landmark Baptists place great emphasis upon the local church as the unit for any kind of cooperative denominational activity. They believe that all other organizations—such as associations, conventions, and mission boards—must be subservient to the local congregation.

The last regular-season baseball games of the Arkansas-Missouri League were played. The Arkansas-Missouri League was a professional Class D minor league that operated from 1934 until 1940. The league was one of only three Depression-era leagues to exist in the state, the others being the Northeast Arkansas League and the Cotton States League.

The Jerome Relocation Center, an internment camp that housed Japanese Americans forcibly removed from the West Coast during World War II, closed. The Jerome Relocation Center was in operation for 634 days—the fewest number of days of any of the relocation camps in the nation. The first of the ten relocation camps to close, Jerome was used as a German prisoner-of-war camp until the end of the war in Europe. Today, the site is mostly used as farmland, although a monument marks the former camp. The remnants of the hospital smokestack can also be seen south of the monument.

The Arkansas State Tuberculosis Sanatorium officially closed, and the main gates were left unlocked for the first time in more than sixty years. The facility later reopened as the Booneville Human Development Center and is classified as a historic site. The sanatorium was established in 1909 about three miles south of Booneville (Logan County). Once fully established, the sanatorium was the relocation center for all white Arkansans with tuberculosis. By the time the facility closed, it had treated more than 70,000 patients, and, in time, its main hospital, the Nyberg Building, became known worldwide for its tuberculosis treatment.

Gillett High School, location of the Gillett Coon Supper since 1947, closed its doors for good. The previous month, the school board voted to close the high school along with Gillett Middle School and Humphrey Elementary School, with students being transferred to DeWitt (Arkansas County) in the fall of 2009. The DeWitt School District ultimately approved the continued use of the gym for the annual event. The Gillett Coon Supper has become a veritable rite of passage for people seeking election to political office in Arkansas.

Jack Carnes received his bachelor of science degree from Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio, before undertaking graduate work in engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Carnes was the founder and owner of Camark Pottery, one of Arkansas’s premier art pottery companies. Camark pottery has become highly valuable to collectors and is featured in museums such as the Old Statehouse Museum and the Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock (Pulaski County).

Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) native Freeman Harrison Owens filed a patent for the first camera to record synchronized sound and video. His employer, however, was later awarded the patent by the New York Supreme Court. Owens worked for several film and radio companies and is credited with 11,812 inventions, among them the plastic lens, which is still used in disposable cameras and sunglasses.

Frank White, who was best recognized as the Republican candidate who defeated Bill Clinton in 1980 after Clinton had served only one term as governor, was born in Texarkana, Texas. White himself was limited to one term when Clinton reclaimed his office in the State Capitol in 1982. White walked away from his defeat with a smile on his face but still bitten by the political bug. After brief employment with Stephens, Inc., White made a final run for governor in 1986, losing badly to Clinton. He then became an executive at Commercial National Bank in Little Rock. In 1998, Governor Mike Huckabee appointed White to the position of State Banking Commissioner, a post he filled until his death.

Arkansas PBS, which operated under the name Arkansas Educational Television Network (AETN) until 2020, began with the creation of the Arkansas Educational Television Association, a citizens’ group interested in establishing a non-commercial alternative to the growing commercial television enterprise. Its mission includes offering lifelong learning opportunities to all Arkansans, supplying instructional programs to Arkansas schools, enhancing the lives of Arkansas citizens, and illuminating the culture and heritage of Arkansas and the world. Instrumental in the establishment of the operations were land made available at Arkansas State Teachers College (now the University of Central Arkansas) in Conway (Faulkner County) and the provision of significant financial support from Conway Corporation.

Crossett (Ashley County) native Gretha Boston won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her role as Queenie in the Broadway revival of Jerome Kern’s Show Boat. She was the first Arkansan to win this award. Boston was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 1997.

Leo Patrick McLaughlin was born in Hot Springs (Garland County). McLaughlin served as mayor of Hot Springs for almost twenty years, allowing the city to operate as an “open” town with illegal gambling permitted under official supervision. As mayor, he reigned as the undisputed boss of Garland County politics. During his time in office, many underworld characters frequented Hot Springs’ spas, and gambling became one of the town’s most popular forms of entertainment. Even today, many recall McLaughlin as one of Hot Springs’ most memorable personalities.

Camark Pottery founder Jack Carnes was commissioned in the United States Naval Reserve (USNR) as a naval aviator. He was commissioned shortly after World War I, but he did not serve overseas. After the war, he moved to Houston, Texas, for several years to pursue a career in the oil business and real estate; when oil was discovered in Smackover (Union County), he moved to Camden (Ouachita County). He founded his pottery business after recognizing that the clay deposits near Camden were good for making pottery. Camark pottery from the company Carnes founded has become highly valuable to collectors and is featured in museums such as the Old Statehouse Museum and the Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock (Pulaski County).

Simmons First National Bank in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) opened its Trust Department. Simmons, which opened in March 1903 with first-day deposits of $3,338.22, is now the largest publicly traded financial holding headquarters in Arkansas. It was one of the first Arkansas banks to open without restrictions after the “bank holiday” of 1933 during the Great Depression and was the first bank in Arkansas to offer the Bank of America credit card, now known as VISA.

The Wynne (Cross County) area had amassed three hundred prisoners of war (POWs) who were available to work on local farms. World War II had led to a shortage of farm workers in Wynne, and local citizens had agreed to receive German POWs. A camp was established to house 600 prisoners but was reported to have housed around 2,000 at one time. These prisoners worked on local farms and helped to build the sewer and water systems located west of Wynne. Hundreds of POWs were dispersed around the county to work. The novel Summer of My German Soldier, written by Bette Greene, was based on childhood memories about these same prisoners working in nearby Parkin (Cross County).

President Richard M. Nixon was the keynote speaker for the dedication at the Tulsa Port of Catoosa in Oklahoma of the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System. Senator John L. McClellan, Congressman Wilbur D. Mills, and Speaker of the House Carl Albert of Oklahoma were in attendance. The system, comprising seventeen locks and dams over a 443-mile span of the Arkansas River from Catoosa, Oklahoma, through Arkansas to the Mississippi River, was designed as an aid to flood control, navigation, and recreation. It also benefits Arkansas with hydropower potential, wildlife conservation, and water supply, as well as by adding billions of dollars annually in trade transportation in Arkansas and Oklahoma.

Approximately 3,000 Federal troops under General A. J. Smith met Colonel Colton Greene’s 600 Confederates in the Engagement at Old River Lake. Despite having only one small cannon, the Confederates lost just four men, with thirty-three wounded, while Union army losses totaled 131 wounded or killed. Afterward, Federal troops occupied Lake Village (Chicot County) during the night, and injured soldiers filled virtually all the homes in the town, including the 1848 Saunders-Pettit-Chapman-Cook Plantation, which was used as an infirmary for soldiers from both armies. During the occupation, several houses were looted, buildings were torched, and all livestock was shot. The town’s newspaper office was also destroyed.

Asa Hodges died. Hodges was a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, representing the First District of Arkansas in the Forty-Third Congress, serving from 1873 to 1875. Following the Brooks-Baxter War, Hodges returned home and resumed the practice of law while also pursuing his longtime agricultural interests, including operating a cotton plantation in Mississippi. In 1888, voters overwhelmingly returned him to the Arkansas General Assembly, where he served until 1890.

Jenny Lind (Sebastian County) native Sonora Dodd suggested the establishment of a Father’s Day holiday to the Spokane Ministerial Association and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Spokane, Washington. The first Father’s Day was celebrated in Spokane on June 19, 1910, fourteen days after Dodd’s father’s birthday. Although the proposed holiday gained many supporters over the years, including Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge, it took several decades to be nationally recognized. In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared June 19 of that year to be Father’s Day. Finally, in 1972, President Richard M. Nixon made Father’s Day a permanent national holiday to be observed annually the third Sunday of June.

Football player Bobby Mitchell was born in Hot Springs (Garland County). Mitchell played professional football for the Cleveland Browns and the Washington Redskins before becoming a scout for the Redskins. He is the only person born in Hot Springs (Garland County) to have been selected to the National Football League (NFL) Hall of Fame.

The Museum of Automobiles was reopened by ten men, all Arkansans and antique car buffs (the museum had closed in 1975 following the 1973 death of Winthrop Rockefeller, who had opened the museum in 1964); ten days later, they formed a nonprofit organization that leased the building from the State of Arkansas. This group became the board of directors, which manages the museum. Members of surrounding antique car clubs lent thirty-three of their fine cars for a new collection to exhibit at the museum. Herman “Buddy” Hoelzeman, who had previously served as director of the museum under Rockefeller, was again appointed director.

Movie producer, director, and screenwriter James Bridges died in Los Angeles, California. He is buried at Oakwood Cemetery in his hometown of Paris (Logan County). Along with some of the most popular films of the 1970s and 1980s, his Arkansas legacy includes the James Bridges Performing Arts Scholarship Fund at the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) and the James Bridges Collection in the UCA Archives, which includes manuscripts, memorabilia, and videos of his movies as well as photographs of the filming of 9/30/55 in Conway (Faulkner County). In 1999, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) dedicated the James Bridges Theatre, which regularly screens the UCLA Film and Television Archives.

Daddy and Them, a comedy-drama written and directed by Billy Bob Thornton, debuted at the Newport Independent Film Festival. The film stars Thornton and Dern as Claude and Ruby Montgomery, a passionate but antagonistic married couple from Arkansas, and featured an impressive supporting cast, including Andy Griffith, Diane Ladd, Kelly Preston, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ben Affleck, Walton Goggins, and country singer/songwriter John Prine. Filming took place in Cabot (Lonoke County) and various locations around Little Rock (Pulaski County), including Pinnacle Mountain State Park and the interior of the Arkansas State Capitol.

Russellville (Pope County) was incorporated. The town grew slowly until construction of the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad, which had been on hold since the Civil War, was completed. The town grew rapidly after the line came through Russellville in 1873. Russellville is located on Lake Dardanelle, approximately halfway between Little Rock (Pulaski County) and Fort Smith (Sebastian County), and is the seat of Pope County. The largest town in the county, it is home to Arkansas’s only nuclear power plant, Arkansas Nuclear One. As a major business center of the area, it is home to ten divisions of Fortune 500 companies and Arkansas Tech University.

John Netherland (J. N.) Heiskell graduated at the head of his class at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Heiskell served as editor of the Arkansas Gazette for more than seventy years. Over the course of his career, he headed the newspaper during two world wars, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and thousands of other events.

The Marked Tree Lock and Siphons began operation. The siphons are used to control water flow on the St. Francis River. They were built in response to the Flood of 1927, which broke levees and flooded much of the town of Marked Tree (Poinsett County). They are of historical significance because they were important elements of the St. Francis River Basin Flood Control Project and the U.S. Corps of Engineers’ flood control plan for the Mississippi River Valley. According to the Corps of Engineers, they are unique in architectural achievement. The lock was completed in 1926. It is about nine miles away from Marked Tree, on an abandoned artificial channel of the St. Francis River.

A meeting was held at Philander Smith College Auditorium to organize an association to preserve the Mosaic Templars of America National Grand Temple in downtown Little Rock (Pulaski County). The Mosaic Templars, founded in 1882, was a civic and fraternal organization that provided burial insurance to African Americans. In 1992, the building was for sale, and a number of potential buyers wanted to raze it. The building was saved, with the City of Little Rock purchasing it; the city turned the building over to the Department of Arkansas Heritage, which was overseeing its renovation, but an early morning fire on March 16, 2005, destroyed it. A new $7 million cultural center opened on the site in 2008 with exhibits interpreting Arkansas’s African-American history.

The last service was held at the Baptist church in Tomberlin (Lonoke County). The church had been erected in the 1800s a mile east of town, and it served Landmark (Missionary) and Southern Baptist congregations. A new building was built in 1920 closer to town, but dissension developed, and a group withdrew and formed a new church at nearby Coy (Lonoke County). The Landmark congregation remained at the site until its last service.

John Wilson Martin was born in Harrison County, Virginia, and went to New Orleans, Louisiana, around 1843 to attend lectures at Tulane University. He was settled in Warren (Bradley County) by 1848, when he married and established what became a flourishing medical practice. It was said that Martin would ride by “horseback all day to reach the frequently remote residences” of the sick. Stories abound of his nightlong rides around the countryside to reach wounded Confederate soldiers while trying to avoid Union patrols. Oral tradition maintains that he began building the John Wilson Martin house for his family in 1862. The house is the oldest surviving residence in Warren and has been renovated for use as the Bradley County Historical Museum.

Albert Homer Purdue, who had worked on his family’s farm and had had little formal education until the age of twenty, entered Indiana State Normal School (later Indiana State University), where he earned a diploma. Purdue later studied at Purdue University where he worked with John Casper Branner, state geologist of Arkansas from 1887 to 1893, and ran a cleaning business with fellow geology student Herbert Clark Hoover. After becoming the first geology student to graduate from Stanford University in California, Purdue was given a position as professor of geology at Arkansas Industrial University (later the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, in Washington County). He was a renowned geologist and published many works on the geology of Arkansas and Tennessee.

The parish of the Annunciation, under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan of Detroit, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North America, and the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople (now Istanbul), Turkey, received a state charter. A church building at 1500 Center Street was purchased from the Winfield Methodist congregation in 1919. The parish outgrew this building, and in 1983, a new church was constructed at its present location, 1100 Napa Valley Drive. Annunciation in Little Rock is the oldest continuous Orthodox church in Arkansas.

Scipio Jones and Edgar McHaney filed, in a Little Rock (Pulaski County) court, a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of the Moore defendants, six of twelve African-American men convicted and sentenced to die for their supposed roles in what is now known as the Elaine Massacre. Judge John Martineau signed the writ and set a hearing on the petition. Ultimately, on January 14, 1925, Governor Thomas McRae ordered the release of the Moore defendants by granting them indefinite furloughs after they had pled guilty to second-degree murder. In the interim, Jones had secured the release of the other Elaine defendants.

A mob murdered Owen Flemming, an African American man, near Mellwood (Phillips County). At the time of the lynching, Arkansas was experiencing unprecedented flooding. The Flood of 1927 remains the most destructive in Arkansas history, covering about 6,600 square miles and inundating thirty-six of the state’s seventy-five counties. Many Black citizens who lived along the Mississippi River and other flooding waterways were forced to work on the levees, often at gunpoint. One of these was Flemming, who reportedly killed a man at the levee camp and then fled before being lynched.

The Arkansas State University (ASU) Board of Trustees, as a prerequisite for the museum’s accreditation, legally recognized the Arkansas State University Museum as an integral part of the university and issued a statement of permanence. The Arkansas State University Museum, located on ASU campus in Jonesboro (Craighead County), holds significant historic, archaeological, and natural history collections hailing primarily from the state of Arkansas. One of the first museums in the Southeast to be accredited by the American Association of Museums (AAM), it is the largest and most comprehensive museum in northeast Arkansas.

Blues musician CeDell Davis was born in Helena (Phillips County), where his mother worked as a cook but was also known as a faith healer. As a recording artist, Davis helped bring blues from its rural Southern roots into the twenty-first century. Because of the crippling effects of childhood polio, he learned to play his guitar upside down, using a butter knife as a slide. With his unique slide guitar style, he performed the traditional Delta blues he learned growing up in Helena. In 1957, Davis was badly injured in a stampede at a St. Louis tavern, crippling him even further and confining him to a wheelchair. Although he was a longtime professional musician, recordings of his music were not available until 1983. Following that, he recorded several albums and became a favorite with a new generation of blues fans. In 1994, he released his first solo album, Feel Like Doin’ Something Wrong. He remained active in music until the end of his life; members of rock bands R.E.M. and Screaming Trees appeared on his 2002 release, Lightning Struck the Pine. He died in 2017.

Forrest Wood was born in Flippin (Marion County). Wood is known worldwide for his success in the sport fishing industry. In 1968, he founded Ranger Boats, now the largest manufacturer of bass boats in the nation. Wood has thus become known as an “outdoor legend” and the father of the modern bass boat. In 1968, he began building lake boats, setting up shop in the back of a filling station. He made six boats that year, and Forrest’s Ranger Boats, named after the Army Rangers and the Texas Rangers, began to attract attention. Even after selling Ranger Boats in 1987, Wood remained a legend in the sport fishing industry.

Morgan Chauntel Nick, a six-year-old girl, was presumably abducted from a parking lot in Alma (Crawford County). The fruitless effort to locate her led to her mother Colleen’s establishment of the Morgan Nick Foundation in 1996 in an effort to prevent abductions and to help families of other missing children. The Morgan Nick Alert is the Arkansas affiliate of the Amber Alert Program, an acronym for the “America’s Missing Broadcast Emergency Response” administered under the auspices of the Department of Justice. The program attempts to marshal the forces of all levels of law enforcement agencies and to engage the services of local radio, television stations, and other media.

As a result of Betty Bumpers’s and Rosalynn Carter’s efforts to promote childhood immunizations and comprehensive AIDS vaccine research, President Bill Clinton launched the Vaccine Research Center (VRC), a new venture for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The VRC was named for Dale and Betty Bumpers to recognize their tireless efforts to promote childhood immunizations and research for other vaccines as a comprehensive national healthcare program. After her husband became governor of Arkansas in 1971, Bumpers, as first lady, launched a campaign to have every child in the state immunized against childhood diseases by the age of two. The campaign garnered national attention through the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and Bumpers was soon assisting other states in developing similar immunization programs.

Ashdown (Little River County) native Hazel Walker was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Tennessee. Recognized as the greatest amateur women’s basketball player of the 1930s and 1940s, eleven-time Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) All-American Walker was the only woman ever to own, manage, and star for her own professional basketball team. In 2000, CNN/Sports Illustrated named her sixteenth, the highest-ranking woman, on its list of Arkansas’s Top Fifty Athletic Figures of the Twentieth Century.