Days in AR History

The town of Jerome (Drew County) was incorporated for a second time. The location of a Japanese American relocation camp during World War II, the town of Jerome has been a transportation crossroads for most of its history.

Fort Smith (Sebastian County) came under control of the Confederate army. Until September 1, 1863, many Confederate soldiers, including 475 unknown, were buried in the post cemetery. The cemetery was designated a national facility in 1867, and the Fort Smith National Cemetery is considered the oldest of the state’s original national cemeteries.

Clarke’s Academy in Berryville (Carroll County) was destroyed by fire. In 1867, Isaac A. Clarke, innovative educator and professor, began the academy, which flourished for more than five years before being destroyed. On the following Monday after the fire, Clarke opened the academy in a building in town and operated there until the new schoolhouse, the one now standing, was available. For thirty-eight years, until 1905, Clarke sustained Clarke’s Academy, educating men and women from throughout the United States.

Esther Bindursky, editor of the weekly Lepanto News Record and an award-winning journalist and photographer, died. Among her numerous awards, Bindursky won a first-place National Federation of Press Women (NFPW) award for her photo of a nun who survived a 1955 train wreck in Marked Tree (Poinsett County) that killed five people. The same photo was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Cameron Townsend died after battling acute leukemia. In June 1934, Townsend, along with Leonard Livingston Legters, founded a linguistic training program for the purpose of promoting Bible translation among minority language groups. Named Camp Wycliffe in honor of the first scholar to translate the entire Bible into English, John Wycliffe, the program was based in an old abandoned farmhouse near Sulphur Springs (Benton County). The organizations Townsend founded continue to pursue the admonition engraved on his tombstone, located at the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service center in Waxhaw, North Carolina: “‘Dear Ones: by love serve one another. Finish the task. Translate the Scriptures into every language.’ —Uncle Cam.”

The U.S. Supreme Court, after years of litigation, let stand a lower court ruling that held Hercules, one of the original owners of what became the Vertac site, responsible for $120 million of the clean-up costs. By slipping into receivership, Vertac evaded any responsibility for the damages. The Vertac site in Jacksonville (Pulaski County) is one of the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites and Arkansas’s most publicized Superfund site. Cleanup of the area after its abandonment by its corporate owner took more than a decade, and the name “Vertac” soon became synonymous in Arkansas with the fear of industrial pollution. By 2010, the site was listed as safe by the EPA, but the legacy of industrial waste remains.

Robert Brownlee was born in Bonkle, Cambusnethan Parish, a tiny community in the Scottish lowlands. A Scottish stonemason, Brownlee lived in Little Rock (Pulaski County) from 1837 to 1849 and helped build the first state house in Arkansas, as well as several other historic landmarks in Pulaski County.

Artist Henry Yuzuru Sugimoto—whose paintings chronicled the immigrant experience, including the time he and his family spent in internment camps in southern Arkansas during World War II—married Susie Tagawa in Hanford, California. In 1942, Sugimoto and his family were among the thousands of other people of Japanese ancestry who were relocated by the U.S. government to internment camps in response to the fear that Japanese Americans were threats to American security after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Sugimotos were sent first to Arkansas’s Jerome Relocation Center, arriving in October 1942. When the Jerome camp closed in June 1944, the Sugimotos were moved to the Rohwer camp, where they stayed until August 1945. This incarceration was a defining experience in Sugimoto’s life.

Fay Hempstead, an attorney, poet, and dedicated worker in the service of the Grand Lodge of Freemasonry, died in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Hempstead wrote the first school textbook on Arkansas history, as well as other historical works, and was named poet laureate of Freemasonry—an honor previously bestowed on only two other people. He is buried at Mount Holly Cemetery in Little Rock.

Owen Vincent “Owney” Madden, a gangster and underworld boss in New York City in the 1920s who retired to Hot Springs (Garland County) in the 1930s, died of emphysema about a year after the state government took its first decisive steps to shut down illegal gambling and prostitution operations in Hot Springs.

Al Hibbler, a pop/jazz singer and the first African American to have a radio program in Little Rock (Pulaski County), died in Chicago, Illinois. He was also the first blind entertainer to gain national prominence. He sang with the Duke Ellington Band for eight and a half years before he left to make five solo recordings that became Billboard pop hits. Hibbler also became a prominent figure in the civil rights movement.

The Blytheville, Leachville and Arkansas Southern Railroad (BL&AS) was incorporated. The railroad had first come to Leachville (Mississippi County) in 1899 with the Jonesboro, Lake City and Eastern Railroad. The railroad was a significant industry in the town for many years. The BL&AS depot at 2nd & McNamee is now privately owned and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in June 1992.

Arkansas/Delta blues great Albert King was born on a cotton plantation in Indianola, Mississippi. One of the most influential blues guitarists of all time, he was one of the three so-called “Kings of the Blues”—the triumvirate of B. B. King, Freddie King, and himself. His style of single-string-bending intensity—the essence of blues guitar—is evident in the approaches of thousands of acolytes, including Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Eric Clapton.

A Korean War battle took place near Tongmang-ni for which Charles Leon Gilliland, a member of Company I, Seventh Infantry Regiment, Third Infantry Division, was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. According to the medal citation, Gilliland displayed “conspicuous gallantry and outstanding courage above and beyond the call of duty” during an enemy assault against Gilliland’s company. Gilliland’s body was never recovered, and he was declared dead in 1954. The Medal of Honor was presented to his family during a ceremony at the Pentagon.

Batesville (Independence County) native Rick Monday, who played nineteen seasons for four different teams from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, stopped an attempted flag burning. While playing in the outfield for the Chicago Cubs against the Dodgers in Los Angeles, Monday saw two spectators leave the stands and attempt to burn an American flag in the outfield. Monday raced to the spot and took the flag away before it was ignited. A month later, the rescued flag was presented to Monday by officials from the Los Angeles team. The Cubs traded Monday to the Dodgers after that season, and he played in the World Series three times for the Dodgers.

Two weeks after six Cuban men drove a Havana city bus through a gate onto the grounds of the Peruvian Embassy in Cuba intending to seek political asylum, more than 300 American boats had entered the port of Mariel, Cuba, to transport Cubans who wished to seek refuge outside the island, in spite of the U.S. government’s request that its citizens not become involved. The ensuing flood of an estimated 125,000 Cubans landing at American ports resulted in a reported 25,390 being housed at Fort Chaffee near Fort Smith (Sebastian County). Criticism of Governor Bill Clinton’s handling of the situation is believed to have influenced his defeat by Frank White in his 1980 campaign for reelection.

John James Audubon was born Jean Rabin in Saint-Domingue (Haiti). He was the illegitimate child of Jean Audubon, who was a ship’s captain, and Jeanne Rabin, who was a French chambermaid. Audubon, a frontier naturalist and artist, is famous for illustrating and writing The Birds of America. He visited Arkansas Territory in 1820 and 1822 and documented Arkansas’s birds, including the Traill’s flycatcher, also known as the willow flycatcher, which is the only bird originally discovered in Arkansas.

The only photograph of the Sultana was taken during a short stop at the waterfront at Helena (Phillips County). The photograph shows that the boat was astonishingly overloaded—in a vessel 260 feet long and forty-two feet wide, built in 1863 for 300 or so passengers, thousands of people could be seen, nearly all of them Union soldiers recently released from Confederate prisoner-of-war camps. Not long after the boat stopped briefly at Memphis, the boilers of the Sultana exploded near Mound City (Crittenden County) in the middle of the night on April 27. Approximately 2,000 to 2,300 people were killed. This remains the worst maritime disaster in North America.

A special session of the Arkansas legislature convened. The nineteenth governor of Arkansas, Daniel Webster Jones, had called for the special session because he was frustrated by the legislature’s lack of productivity. The most important railroad measure from the governor’s viewpoint was the railroad commission bill, a regulatory measure, but the pro-railroad forces, continuing their domination of the Senate, killed it.

Leo Patrick McLaughlin, who served a memorable term of almost twenty years (1927 to 1947) as the mayor of Hot Springs (Garland County), was honorably discharged from the army at the rank of corporal. Underworld characters frequented Hot Springs during the McLaughlin administration. Men such as Al Capone, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, and Frank Costello visited the spa town with the understanding that they would exhibit only their best behavior. The nation’s gangsters utilized Hot Springs as a sanctuary or retreat; McLaughlin and his associates welcomed them, as long as they did not bother the locals and left their criminal activities behind.

The town of Waters (Montgomery County) changed its name to Pine Ridge in honor of Lum and Abner, characters created by comedians Chet Lauck and partner Tuffy Goff and based on the people of Waters and Mena (Polk County). Their Lum and Abner radio program was one of the longest-running and most popular programs ever on radio.

The steamboat Sultana exploded on the Mississippi River, ten miles north of Memphis, Tennessee, killing as many as 1,800, mostly Civil War veterans. The steamboat had arrived in Vicksburg, Mississippi, from New Orleans, with boilers leaking badly, and took on some 1,996 Federal soldiers and thirty-five officers who had been released from Confederate prisons at war’s end. The load far exceeded what was safe for a steamboat of that size, and it is likely that the heavy load strained the boilers and led to the explosion. It is believed to be buried today beneath a soybean field in northeast Arkansas. In nearby Marion (Crittenden County), a historical marker pays tribute to the disaster.

Floyd Brown was born in Stampley, Mississippi, the second of ten children born to African-American tenant farmers. Brown founded the Fargo Agricultural School in Monroe County in 1919 to provide the equivalent of elementary and secondary vocational education for black students. The school was for both day and residential students and was modeled after the Tuskegee Institute, which Brown attended, where students learned practical skills intended to help them achieve success and economic security.

James Byron Reed died in Little Rock (Pulaski County). He was admitted to the state bar in 1906 and established a private practice that same year. He also ventured into politics, winning election to the Arkansas House of Representatives, where he served in 1907. He ultimately represented the Sixth District of Arkansas in the Sixty-eighth through the Seventieth U.S. Congresses, serving from 1923 to 1929.

The Southwestern Proving Ground Airport, which had been the site of an army ordnance plant during World War II, was deeded to the city of Hope (Hempstead County) and dedicated as the site of the Hope Municipal Airport. An air show celebrated the occasion. In June, the government deeded 750 acres near the airport to be leased in support of the airport.

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock School of Law was named for William H. Bowen, chief of staff to Governor Bill Clinton from 1991 to 1992 and dean of the law school from 1995 to 1997. In the summer of 1992, the law school was relocated to a new building, where it remains. President Bill Clinton spoke at the dedication. One advantage of the law school’s location in the capital city is the robust pool of attorneys and judges from which its numerous adjunct professors are hired.

The television movie of A Painted House, based upon John Grisham’s bestselling novel, aired on the CBS network. Prior to its national television broadcast, the film had its world premiere at Arkansas State University (ASU) in Jonesboro (Craighead County), at the request of Grisham. Proceeds from the event went to an endowment fund for the Heritage Studies PhD program at ASU. Grisham was born in Jonesboro, and, while much of his life has been spent outside of Arkansas, Grisham has strong ties to northeast Arkansas. Grisham’s grandfather owned Skidmore Piano Store in Blytheville (Mississippi County), and many of his relatives still live in northeast Arkansas.

In the long newspaper war conducted between the Arkansas Gazette (then the Daily Arkansas Gazette) and the Arkansas Democrat, the Gazette called James Newton (J. N.) Smithee “too light a weight” to threaten the Arkansas Democrat’s place in the community. The continued criticism eventually led to a duel between Gazette owner John D. Adams and Democrat owner Smithee. The Smithee-Adams Duel has been described as “the last duel fought in Arkansas.”

Poet and teacher Andrea Hollander was born in Berlin, Germany. Hollander became the writer-in-residence at Lyon College in Batesville (Independence County) in 1991. The author of several collections, she published more than 250 poems and essays in journals including Poetry, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Hudson Review, Doubletake, Shenandoah, Field, Nimrod, Laurel Review, Ohio Review, and Indiana Review.

Wooster (Faulkner County) was incorporated. The community was named for a man known only as Wooster, who is described in local histories as “acting postmaster.” In the twenty-first century, the town has become the site of several new subdivisions.

John Daly was born the youngest of three children in Carmichael, California. Daly’s family moved to Dardanelle (Yell County) when he was five because his father took a job at Nuclear One in Russellville (Pope County). Daly began playing golf soon after and became a professional golfer on the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) Tour in 1990, having stunned the golf world by winning the PGA Championship as a rookie. He bought a golf course in his hometown of Dardanelle and became a member of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame.

A made-for-television movie whose script was written by Maya Angelou and adapted from her autobiographical novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was aired by CBS. The book, based on Angelou’s life growing up in Stamps (Lafayette County), was published by Random House in 1970 and was nominated for a National Book Award. It was the first of six autobiographical novels written by Angelou that cemented her place as one of the great voices of African-American literature.

More than sixty years after the last confirmed sighting in the United States, a research team announced that at least one male ivory-billed woodpecker survived in the Big Woods of east Arkansas. Long believed to be extinct, the ivory-billed woodpecker was rediscovered in 2004. Published in the journal Science, the findings included multiple sightings of the elusive woodpecker and frame-by-frame analyses of brief video footage. The evidence was gathered during an intensive year-long search in the Cache River and White River national wildlife refuges in eastern Arkansas, involving more than fifty experts and field biologists working as part of the Big Woods Conservation Partnership, led by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and the Nature Conservancy.

Chester Ashley died in Washington DC while representing Arkansas in the U.S. Senate. Ashley was prominent in territorial and antebellum Arkansas and was involved in the dispute over ownership of the site of Little Rock (Pulaski County). A member of the political powerhouse known as the “Family,” Ashley was the third Arkansan elected to the Senate and was probably the wealthiest citizen of Arkansas for much of his adult life.

Five followers of Charles Taze Russell (who later came to be referred to as Jehovah’s Witnesses) were jailed in Walnut Ridge (Lawrence County) because of their resistance to the war effort. During World War I, followers of Russell refused to serve in the U.S. armed forces even when they were drafted. Identified as W. B. Duncan, Edward French, Charles Franke, Mr. Griffen, and Mrs. D. Van Hoesen, these five people were assaulted in jail by an angry mob and were whipped, tarred and feathered, and driven from town.

President Calvin Coolidge changed the name of the Arkansas National Forest to the Ouachita National Forest. He also proposed extending the national forest into eastern Oklahoma. President Herbert Hoover fulfilled this proposal on December 3, 1930, by extending the Ouachita National Forest into Le Flore County, Oklahoma. The Arkansas National Forest was created through an executive order issued by President Theodore Roosevelt. Forest Service Chief Gifford Pinchot remarked at the time that this national forest was the only major shortleaf pine forest under the federal government’s protection.

A nineteen-year-old African American man named Willie Kees was shot near Lepanto (Poinsett County) for allegedly attempting to attack a white woman. It was both the first recorded lynching in Poinsett County and the last recorded lynching in Arkansas. The death of Willie Kees drew national attention because, by happenstance, it occurred during the same week that John Rushin and Lint Shaw were lynched in Georgia. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in a letter written to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, noted that the two incidents were the seventy-first and seventy-second “authenticated” lynchings that had occurred since Roosevelt had been inaugurated on March 4, 1933.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt praised Rear Admiral Corydon Wassell in one of his fireside chats, saying that he was “almost like a Christlike shepherd devoted to his flock.” Dr. Wassell, who was from Little Rock (Pulaski County), was one of the first national heroes of World War II. He distinguished himself and was awarded the Navy Cross for his determined faithfulness to the care of wounded men in the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia), electing to remain there with servicemen who were not ambulatory rather than being redeployed with those who were being evacuated from the scene.

One Great Lakes Chemical Corporation worker died and eleven others were injured when a bromine-based material was accidentally released. Bromine (chemical symbol Br) is a highly corrosive, reddish-brown, volatile element found in liquid form. Bromine—along with fluorine, chlorine, and iodine—is part of a family of elements known as the halogens. Arkansas ranks first in the world in the production of bromine, the basis for many widely used chemical compounds. Bromine, along with petroleum and natural gas, is one of the top three minerals produced in Arkansas. Bromine is dangerous if it comes in contact with skin, and its vapor is harmful if inhaled. For these reasons, worker safety at the sites of production is a cause for concern.

The Pony Express was started, spelling the end of the Butterfield Overland Express, which carried the first overland transcontinental mail by stagecoach through Arkansas as it went from the Mississippi River to California. Although the Butterfield Stage was unmatched in passenger service, the mail service—which the Pony Express excelled in—was uneconomical.

William Lee Gerig died; he is buried at the Rose Hill Cemetery in Arkadelphia (Clark County). During his lifetime, he was considered a leading authority on the construction of earthen dams and served as the consulting engineer for all dams constructed by the Corps of Engineers from 1923 to 1938. In 1946, a ship was named for Gerig and launched in Pascagoula, Mississippi. A bronze plaque was placed at the chief engineer’s office in Washington DC in honor of Gerig’s accomplishments.

Herman Dierks, co-founder and two-time president of the Dierks Lumber and Coal Company, died. Dierks supervised the company’s lumberyard in De Queen (Sevier County) and other parts of eastern Oklahoma and northern Louisiana. With the help of his brothers, he helped create and control the Dierks timber empire. In 1969, twenty-three years after Dierks’s death, the company sold all its assets to Weyerhaeuser Company. Until that time, it had been the largest family-owned landholding in the history of the country.

Grace Elizabeth Ward, who was to become Miss Arkansas in 1981 and was chosen as Miss America in 1982, was born in Ozark (Franklin County). Ward changed her name to Elizabeth Ward Gracen after she went into acting because another Elizabeth Ward was already a member of the Screen Actors Guild. In 1992, she became the first former Miss America to appear nude on a Playboy magazine cover. Gracen has appeared in a number of films, television series, and made-for-television movies and has also done voice acting.

Bergman (Boone County) was incorporated. Bergman is a town on State Highway 7 several miles northeast of Harrison (Boone County). Originally a stop on the White River line of the Iron Mountain Railroad, Bergman is best known in the twenty-first century for its role in the poultry industry of Arkansas.

Lloyd “Arkansas Slim” Andrews, best known for film roles as a sidekick to Western stars in the 1940s through the early 1950s and, after that, as a host of children’s television programs, died in Gravette (Benton County). Among other highlights in Andrews’s career were a ten-month tour as a comedian and musician with Bob Wills in 1947; playing harmonica, accordion, and other instruments with a Wills satellite band led by Harley Huggins in 1948; nearly 10,000 television appearances; and a speaking role as the ferryman in the television miniseries The Blue and the Gray (1982). He received composer credits in the 1940 Tex Ritter film Arizona Frontier for the song “Wastin’ Time.”

After completing the maximum sentence for contempt, Susan McDougal again refused to testify before Kenneth Starr’s grand jury, but, in 1999, she was found not guilty of obstruction of justice and ordered to be released. McDougal became famous in the 1990s for refusing to testify before Starr and the Office of Independent Counsel (OIC) grand jury held in Little Rock (Pulaski County) during the Whitewater scandal investigation. She spent approximately twenty-two months in seven jails, including maximum-security prisons with violent offenders. She was also held for seven weeks in a Plexiglas-enclosed soundproof cell, an experience she described as “hellish.”

The Skirmish at Whitmore’s Mill took place, being part of the larger Camden Expedition, when approximately 2,000 Federals arrived at what they misidentified as Whitmore’s Mill, about four miles from a Confederate camp along the Saline River. A scouting party of approximately 150 Federal troops drove Confederate pickets back to camp, but the Confederates were reinforced and dispersed the Federal scouting party into general flight.

Joseph Brooks died in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Brooks made an unsuccessful run for governor in 1872 in a race marred with fraud. Afterward, he challenged the election, and the Pulaski County Circuit Court decided in his favor. When Baxter refused to concede the election to Brooks, Brooks’s supporters removed Baxter from the governor’s office by force. Others armed themselves and came to Baxter’s support, and the following conflict was known as the Brooks-Baxter War. Eventually, the debate was settled by a congressional committee’s conclusion that Baxter’s claim was stronger.

The dead body of a twelve-year-old white girl named Floella McDonald was discovered by a janitor in the belfry of the First Presbyterian Church in Little Rock (Pulaski County). The next afternoon, the janitor and his seventeen-year-old mulatto son were arrested for the murder. The backlash from the murder caused a wave of mob violence that culminated in the lynching of an African-American man named John Carter. The lynching and the rioting that followed became one of the most notorious incidents of racial violence in the state’s history.

World War II hero Colonel William O. Darby of Fort Smith (Sebastian County) was killed by an enemy shell in Italy, only two days before enemy forces in Italy surrendered. Darby was the founder of the famous ranger battalions, and to train his rangers, he established a rigorous program of live ammunition training, long speed marches, cliff climbing, and obstacle courses. Darby was originally buried in a military cemetery outside of Cisterna, Italy, but on March, 11, 1949, his body was returned to Arkansas and reinterred at the Fort Smith National Cemetery, just a few blocks from his boyhood home.