Days in AR History - Starting with N

James “Ike” Tomlinson was born in Macon, Illinois. Tomlinson was responsible for the revival of the athletics program at Arkansas State University (ASU) after World War II. An athlete who coached five sports, he served as head baseball coach for thirty-two years, also serving as ASU’s athletic director for three decades. He was named Associated Press National Coach of the Year and was selected for induction into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame. In 1993, ASU’s baseball complex, Tomlinson Stadium, was named in his honor.

The Saenger Theatre, which was known as the “Showplace of the South,” opened in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) and made the city an entertainment center for southeast Arkansas. The building, now one of only about 100 remaining of 300 theaters built by the Saenger brothers in the 1920s, cost $200,000 at the time and seated 1,500 people. On the front row of the Saenger at the opening were stars such as Gloria Swanson, Norma Talmadge, and producer D. W. Griffith, along with proprietor Julian Saenger. Al G. Fields Minstrels, Ziegfeld Follies, and other traveling theatrical groups performed at the Saenger Theatre. Roy Rogers, his horse Trigger, and Will Rogers were among the many notable performers who entertained there.

The Nevada County Depot and Museum, located in the former Iron Mountain Railroad Depot in downtown Prescott (Nevada County), was put on the National Register of Historic Places. The museum, founded in 1976 as the Nevada County State Park Association, is the only museum in Nevada County. It houses exhibits on early county history, Civil War battles fought in the area, and the railroad history of the county. It also posts rotating exhibits of photographs of daily life in the 1930s and 1940s.

Journalist and artist William Minor “Cush” Quesenbury (the nickname reflecting how the last name should be pronounced) married Adaline Parks in Cane Hill (Washington County), where they settled. He joined the gold rush to California in 1850, leaving his wife and first-born son, Stanley, behind. A diary and two sketchbooks survive from this expedition, and his detailed drawings of Western sites provide important documentation of historic places. Quesenbury did not prosper as a miner, but he did find work writing first for New Orleans’s California True Delta and then for the new Sacramento Daily Union, whose editor, John F. Morse, promoted public health and scientific agriculture, causes that Quesenbury later supported.

Daniel Phillips Upham died at his home in Dudley, Massachusetts. Upham was an active Republican politician, businessman, plantation owner, and Arkansas State Militia commander following the Civil War. He is perhaps best remembered for his part during Reconstruction as the leader of a successful militia campaign against the Ku Klux Klan in the Militia War from 1868 to 1869. He is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Little Rock (Pulaski County).

Shirley (Van Buren County) was incorporated. The town rests on the Middle Fork of the Little Red River in northeastern Van Buren County. Established by the railroad, the town has become an agricultural center for the region with a focus also on recreation and tourism. Because it is near Greers Ferry Lake, Shirley also boasts of many recreational opportunities, including hiking, fishing, canoeing, golfing, and horseback riding.

Nineteen-year-old William Turner was lynched in Helena (Phillips County) for allegedly attacking a young white girl. He was arrested and placed in the jail, which adjoined the courthouse. According to the Arkansas Gazette, local citizens, in a state of “suppressed excitement,” began to gather near the courthouse during the afternoon. In an attempt to protect Turner from harm, two deputy sheriffs put him into a car shortly after dark to take him to jail in nearby Marianna (Lee County). They were only a short distance outside of Helena when they were stopped by a mob of twenty-five to thirty masked men who demanded the prisoner. The deputies, outnumbered, surrendered him, and he was shot by the roadside.

Chester Bush—who had succeeded his father, John E. Bush, a former slave who was co-founder of the hugely successful African-American fraternal organization the Mosaic Templars of America—died. John E. Bush had served as chief financial officer and chief operating officer of the organization and, following his death, was succeeded in the position first by his son Chester and then, after Chester’s death, by his son Aldridge.

Bill Seiz, one of the most active and visible leaders in Hot Springs (Garland County), died in Hot Springs. Seiz’s most noteworthy contributions to Hot Springs came in the areas of industrial development and city planning. He was an organizer and president of the Ouachita Area Development Council (OADC), the Chamber of Commerce Industrial Committee, the Garland County Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC/GCIDC), and the Hot Springs/Garland County Regional Planning Commission.

The William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park, located in Little Rock (Pulaski County), was officially dedicated. Thousands attended the rain-soaked ceremony, including such notables as former presidents Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush, President George W. Bush, U2 lead singer Bono, comedian Al Franken, and author Maya Angelou.

The Skirmish at Lawrenceville took place. Major William J. Teed led the Eighth Missouri Cavalry (US) in an attack against a Confederate force commanded by Major John B. Cocke on the farmland of a Dr. Green in Monroe County. Teed’s force captured and destroyed cooking utensils and a variety of other material goods and foodstuffs. This short skirmish appears to have taken place as part of general operations in southeastern Arkansas, with no direct connection to any larger Civil War campaign.

Robert Brownlee, the Scottish stonemason who helped build the first state house as well as many other historic landmarks in Pulaski County, died. Brownlee also helped create the monument to William Gilchrist, Grandmaster Mason of the Grand Lodge of Arkansas. The sixteen-foot gravestone sits on a nine-foot base and dominates the Masonic plot in Mount Holly Cemetery in Little Rock (Pulaski County).

William Allen Oldfield, who had served in the U.S. House of Representatives for Arkansas’s Second District since his election in 1908, died after more than twenty years in the office. The succession of his widow, Pearl, whose nomination was made by the Democratic Central Committee rather than in a special primary election, made her the first woman from Arkansas elected to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.

William A. Oldfield died at age fifty-four in Washington DC after undergoing gall bladder surgery. Oldfield had been elected as a Democrat to the Sixty-first U.S. Congress and to the nine succeeding Congresses, serving from 1909 until his death. He served as a member of the House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means and was chosen as chair of the Democratic Congressional Committee, campaigning across the country for Democratic candidates and incumbents. He was reelected to the Seventy-first Congress, his tenth consecutive term, but he died before he could take office. His wife, Pearl Oldfield, was elected to serve out his term, becoming the first woman from Arkansas elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Birth control advocate Hilda Kahlert Cornish died. Cornish founded the Arkansas birth control movement and was instrumental in founding the organization that became Planned Parenthood Association of Arkansas. At Cornish’s initiative, a group of physicians, business and religious leaders, and women active in civic work formed the Arkansas Eugenics Association (AEA). Rabbi Ira Eugene Sanders said, “It was suggested that because the movement might evoke criticism on the part of the rather orthodox and staid community, that we call it the Arkansas Eugenics Association on the grounds that nobody would object to being well born.” In early 1931, AEA opened the Little Rock Birth Control Clinic in the basement of Baptist Hospital. AEA changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Association of Arkansas in 1942.

At a joint meeting of the State Parks, Recreation, and Travel Commission and the Heritage Commission, negotiations culminated with Governor Bill Clinton’s announcement that the state, in cooperation with the Nature Conservancy, would acquire an eleven-mile segment of the upper Cossatot to form the Cossatot River State Park–Natural Area. The park conserves a twelve-and-one-half-mile stretch of the Cossatot River, a southwest Arkansas stream included by the legislature in the state’s Natural and Scenic Rivers System.

Union County was founded, its name drawn from the petitions that citizens had presented to the legislature in the spirit of “Union and Unity.” Its county seat is El Dorado. At more than 1,000 square miles, Union County is the state’s largest. Ninety percent of the county is forested.

Minutes from the meeting of the board of trustees show that the board and Professor Martin R. Forey of Chicago, Illinois, designated the site of the first building for Judson University. Judson University was a short-lived institution of higher education in Prospect Bluff—present-day Judsonia (White County). The institution stimulated the migration of Northern families to the area, thereby significantly increasing the population and refining the social atmosphere of this typical, mid-nineteenth-century river town. Judson University had an ambitious curriculum and an experienced staff but very little money. At the height of its operations, more than 100 scholars were at the university being instructed in biology, geology, English, math, foreign languages, theology, telegraphy, painting, and elocution by a faculty of five.

Travis Calvin Jackson was born in Waldo (Columbia County). He was one of six native Arkansans elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. He played for the New York Giants and was considered the best National League shortstop in the 1920s. Noted for his defense (which earned him the nickname Stonewall), he was also considered a clutch hitter.

Hot Springs (Garland County) native Alan Ladd was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his chest, which he said was accidental. Ladd was a movie actor who rose from poverty to star in forty-seven films, mostly in the 1940s and 1950s. He often portrayed a solitary hero with a conscience and is best known for his title role in the classic western Shane (1953). Less than two years after the gunshot incident, at age fifty, Ladd was found dead at his Palm Springs, California, home of an overdose of sedatives and alcohol. He is buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California. His star appears on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He also received a star on the Arkansas Walk of Fame in Hot Springs in 1997.

President Ronald Reagan came to Little Rock (Pulaski County) to attend the “America is Back” rally, which was held at the Governor’s Exhibition Hall in the Statehouse Convention Center.

The Wall Street Journal ran a story on Arkansas’s claim to cheese dip. In response, many Texas news outlets ran stories insisting that chile con queso (called “queso” for short), a melted cheese appetizer typically served in Mexican restaurants, is of Texan origin. Defenders of Arkansas’s centrality in the world of cheese dip pointed to the difference of consistency between cheese dip and traditional queso, as well as the larger role that cheese dip plays in Arkansas culture when compared with queso in Texas. Arkansas’s U.S. senators, John Boozman and Tom Cotton, challenged their Texas counterparts, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, to a blind taste test in which Arkansas cheese dip, represented by Heights Taco & Tamale in Little Rock (Pulaski County), won.

The Skirmish at Buckskull occurred. After attempting to clear communication lines in Missouri, Lieutenant Colonel George C. Thilenius of the Fifty-sixth Regiment of Enrolled Missouri Militia led a raid into Arkansas to catch Confederate colonel Timothy Reeves at Cherokee Bay (Randolph County). Near Buckskull, on the Arkansas-Missouri border, Thilenius’s command killed two guerrillas believed to be members of Reeves’s command before charging the undefended town of Buckskull to find no opposing force.

The New York Philharmonic performed William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony at Carnegie Hall. Still grew up in Little Rock (Pulaski County) and achieved national and international acclaim as a composer of symphonic and popular music. As an African American, he broke race barriers and opened opportunities for other minorities. He was also a strong advocate for the performance of works by American composers.

The Plum Bayou resettlement community was dedicated. The federal Resettlement Administration, as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, had purchased 9,854 acres of fertile land for 180 families to settle. Each family was given a long-term mortgage and a chance to own the land. At the dedication, a crowd of about 3,000 listened to speeches by honored guests such as Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace, Senators Joseph T. Robinson and Hattie Caraway, and Governor J. Marion Futrell. This farmstead experiment, intended to help tenant farmers get back on their feet during the Depression, reflected the enduring American dream of family farm ownership.

Barbara Hendricks, an internationally recognized leading lyric soprano, was born in Stephens (Ouachita County). Whether performing light soprano roles in traditional operatic repertory or demanding premieres of twentieth-century vocal music, song recitals, and jazz, Hendricks has been hailed as a leading artist since the mid-1970s. In addition, she is known internationally for her work for human rights and world peace.

Rodger Bumpass, who has won honors and recognition as an actor and for voice performance in film and on television, was born in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Bumpass graduated from Little Rock Central High School and from Arkansas State University where he had won an announcing contest in a radio and television competition. He has performed all over the country and is widely known as the voice of the character Squidward in the Spongebob Square Pants film and TV series.

Representatives from the four Masonic lodges in Arkansas met in Little Rock (Pulaski County) to form the Grand Lodge of Arkansas. By 1838, there were about 100 Masons in Arkansas’s four lodges. In the government of the Freemasons, a lodge must have a charter or authority from a recognized Grand Lodge to work, meet, and initiate new people into the fraternity. In Masonic law, four regularly chartered lodges may unite and establish a Grand Lodge in an area where no other Grand Lodge holds exclusive jurisdiction.

Carrie Nation, who became a temperance advocate so fervent that she was known to smash with a hatchet any place that sold alcohol, married a doctor named Charles Gloyd. She did not know at the time they were married that Gloyd was an alcoholic, and she blamed his alcoholism for the fact that their only child, a girl, had a mental disability. He died a month after she left him.

Almeda James Riddle was born in West Pangburn (Cleburne County). Discovered by a ballad collector in the 1950s, she became a prominent figure in America’s folk music revival. After two decades of concerts and recordings, she received the National Heritage Award from the National Endowment for the Arts for her contributions to the preservation of Ozark folksong traditions.

Actor Laurence Luckinbill was born in Fort Smith (Sebastian County). Luckinbill’s acting career extends through theater, television, and motion pictures. He had a Tony-nominated role in the play The Shadow Box (1977) and a co-starring role as Sybok in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989). Luckinbill has appeared in television shows such as Law and Order and Murder She Wrote, and he played Herr Schultz in the revival of Cabaret in 1999. As of 2012, he continues to do narration and voice-over work.

The King Biscuit Time radio program went on the air on KFFA, 1360 AM, Helena’s first local radio station. Soon after the station’s first broadcast, blues musicians Robert Lockwood Jr. and Sonny Boy Williamson II approached owner Sam Anderson with a proposal to air a local blues radio show. Anderson liked the idea, but he knew the show would have to have a sponsor. He directed Lockwood and Williamson to Max Moore, the owner of Interstate Grocer Company, as a possible sponsor. Moore, who recognized the possibilities of marketing to African Americans, agreed to sponsor the show if the musicians would endorse his product. With greatly increased sales of King Biscuit flour, Interstate Grocery began marketing Sonny Boy cornmeal.

The Albert Pike Hotel was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Located in downtown Little Rock (Pulaski County), the hotel opened in 1929 and was one of the state’s best-known hotels for decades. In 1971, Little Rock’s Second Baptist Church bought the hotel for $740,000 and transformed it into a residence hotel. In the twenty-first century, it remains a residential facility for individuals aged fifty-five and older.

Explorer Dr. George Hunter’s gun discharged while he was cleaning it, ripping through his thumb and lacerating two fingers. He remained in severe pain and in danger of infection for two weeks and was little help to the expedition, known as the Hunter-Dunbar expedition, which Thomas Jefferson commissioned to explore the “Wachita” River and the “hot springs” of Arkansas.

Two factions, led by Chester Ashley and William Russell, settled their differences, ending their year-long conflict over ownership of the land on which Little Rock, the proposed site for the territory’s capital, would stand. Two groups of speculators held conflicting claims to the location of what is today downtown Little Rock. Ashley represented the faction composed of James Bryan, William O’Hara, Amos Wheeler, and Governor William Read Miller, who claimed through a New Madrid certificate. William Russell headed the other faction, which also included Robert Crittenden, Henry Conway, Judge Andrew Scott, and a number of other prominent citizens, who claimed through pre-emption. Although Ashley’s faction lost in court, the two sides compromised and split up downtown Little Rock between them.

Seven men met in a blacksmith shop in Hot Springs (Garland County) with the goal of forming a local assembly of the Knights of Labor (KOL). The largest American labor organization of its era, the KOL recruited workers across boundaries of gender, race, and skill. The organization claimed more than 700,000 members at its peak in 1886, and actual membership at that time may have surpassed one million. In Arkansas, membership peaked at more than 5,000 in 1887, and despite the KOL’s official view of strikes as a measure of last resort, the organization led strikes in Arkansas among railroad workers, coal miners, and African-American farmhands.

Patrolman Maurice Neal “Nick” McDonald, a native of Camden (Ouachita County), arrested Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas Theatre, shortly after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The arrest catapulted the McDonald family into the national press. During the arrest, Oswald, who was wanted then for the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit, attempted to kill McDonald at point-blank range, but the officer managed to overcome Oswald. For valor in his timely capture of Oswald, McDonald was promoted to the special services bureau and then assigned to the Secret Service protection of Oswald’s widow, Marina, and her two small children.

Members of Significant Structures Technical Advisory Committee, a group appointed by the Little Rock Housing Authority to give advice on the historical and architectural significance of buildings in the MacArthur Park neighborhood, joined other preservation-minded individuals in the community to incorporate the Quapaw Quarter Association. The Quapaw Quarter Association is a nonprofit, membership-based organization dedicated to historic preservation in Little Rock (Pulaski County).

Margarete Neel, who became the symbol of the International Red Cross after World War II, died. Neel worked for the Red Cross in the Pacific Theater and the China-Burma-India Theater. While at the 109th Station Hospital in Australia, she was photographed guiding the wheelchair of the wounded Private Gordon Pyle. This photograph was reproduced as a poster for the organization’s post-war funding activities.

The Williford Methodist Church was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The rectangular, single-story wood-frame building is an excellent example of a vernacular interpretation of Gothic Revival style. Supported on a fieldstone foundation, the building has a total of twelve Gothic-style windows. Each side has four windows, one in the back and three in the front. The front door is bordered by a window on each side. Above the double entrance doors is a lancet window. The roof supports a small pyramid belfry. The interior of the building includes a beaded board ceiling, a raised pulpit, a raised choir platform, and two classrooms.

Harold Alexander was born in Lawrence, Kansas. Alexander was a conservationist and stream preservationist who was a proponent of conservation and wildlife management in Arkansas from the 1950s to the 1980s. The Harold E. Alexander Wildlife Management Area in Sharp County was named in recognition of his service to Arkansas conservation and his long career with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission (AGFC). He has been called “the father of Arkansas conservation.”

Gene Hatfield, an artist closely associated with the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) in Conway (Faulkner County), was born. Hatfield’s appreciation for thrift and enjoyment of clutter led to his production of art that has made the display of his work in his front yard in Conway the subject of controversy among his neighbors. Hatfield taught drawing, painting, sculpture, crafts and design, as well as art history and appreciation, at UCA for a number of years. Having studied, exhibited, and lived in France, Hatfield’s art exhibits surrealist influences. He uses discarded materials, mechanical parts, and found objects in his sculptural art.

A new lodge at Queen Wilhelmina State Park, modeled after the original hotel on Rich Mountain near Mena in Polk County, was dedicated. Two years earlier, the previous lodge, built and opened in 1963, had been destroyed by fire. This new lodge (the present building and the third lodge at the site) has thirty-eight guest rooms, a restaurant, a number of recreational facilities, and a “Wonder House” built in 1931, which consists of nine levels and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Conway Cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Conway Cemetery State Park, near Walnut Hill (Lafayette County) in southwest Arkansas, preserves a half-acre cemetery containing the grave of the state’s first governor, James Sevier Conway. The park is located on grounds that were once part of Gov. Conway’s cotton plantation. None of the plantation’s structures remain, and the earliest graves on the site date from 1845. Conway Cemetery State Park is the second-smallest Arkansas state park.

Little Rock (Pulaski County) native musician Art Porter Jr. died in a boating accident in Thailand. He had just completed a performance at the Thailand International Golden Jubilee Jazz Festival commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s reign. Porter was an extremely talented musician proficient on saxophone, drums, and piano. He was an energetic, engaging entertainer and a creative composer whose work ranged across jazz, rhythm and blues, funk, and ballads. The son of legendary jazz musician Art Porter Sr., he released four albums through Polygram/Verve Records before his death.

Charles “Lucky” Luciano was born Salvatore Lucania in Lercara Friddi, Sicily. Luciano was an Italian-American gangster who was said by the FBI to be the man who “organized” organized crime in the United States. In many ways, he was the model for the character Don Corleone in the popular book and movie, The Godfather (1972). He evaded arrest and survived attempted gangland assassinations only to be arrested in 1936 while vacationing in Hot Springs (Garland County). After his arrest, he was extradited to New York to stand trial. Luciano was sentenced to thirty to fifty years at the maximum security Dannemora Prison in New York. He was deported to Italy in 1946, where he died in 1962.

Scipio Africanus Jones was hired by African-American citizens of Little Rock (Pulaski County) to work with the firm of George W. Murphy, an attorney hired by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to defend the twelve men sentenced to death following the Elaine Massacre. By January 14, 1925, all twelve defendants had been released. Jones described his case as “the greatest case against peonage and mob law ever fought in the land.” As a leader in Little Rock’s black community, Jones was responsible for preventing a repeat of the Elaine Massacre in the state’s capital when he and other leaders persuaded fellow black citizens to avoid confrontation amidst the mob violence surrounding the lynching of John Carter in 1927.

A deadly tornado struck near the town of Wickes (Polk County), killing eight people. While April suffers the most tornadoes on average (291), late fall and winter tornadoes are not at all uncommon in Arkansas. The state also has many night tornadoes, in part due to early sunsets during the winter, but tornadoes in Arkansas occur primarily between the hours of 5:00 and 6:00 p.m.

The first World’s Championship Duck Calling Contest was held on Main Street in Stuttgart (Arkansas County) in connection with the Arkansas Rice Festival. It originated because of a dispute that arose over who was the best duck caller. There were seventeen contestants, and the winner of the event was given a hunting coat valued at $6.60. The competition, which has become a national and international event, is now held every Thanksgiving weekend in Stuttgart. In 1947, the committee began awarding cash prizes. Preliminary contests are held in thirty-eight states and in Canada, and the first-prize winner receives a prize package worth more than $15,000.

Wabbaseka (Jefferson County) native Leroy Eldridge Cleaver, one of the best-known and most recognizable symbols of African-American rebellion, fled to Cuba with his wife after his parole was revoked. A leader of the Black Panthers in the 1960s, Cleaver published several books, including the autobiographical titles Soul on Ice (1968) and Soul on Fire (1978), Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches (1969), and Eldridge Cleaver’s Black Papers (1969). Cleaver became a born-again Christian in the 1970s, and in 1980, attempted to create a new religion, Christlam, which was a combination of Christianity and Islam. In the early 1980s, he joined the Republican Party and endorsed Ronald Reagan in Reagan’s 1984 presidential reelection campaign. Cleaver died in California in 1998.