Days in AR History

October 11, 1833

P. O. Hooper, known as the father of Arkansas medicine, was born in Little Rock (Pulaski County). He was one of the founders of the Medical Department of Arkansas Industrial University, now the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). Hooper was also a founder and the first president of the Arkansas State Medical Association, a founding board member and director of the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum (renamed the Arkansas State Hospital in 1933), and vice president of the American Medical Association.

October 11, 1850

Letters by Alden M. Woodruff, son of publisher William E. Woodruff, were published in the Arkansas State Gazette & Democrat, giving details of his experiences searching for gold in the fields of California. These letters and excerpts of articles by F. J. Thibault detailing their experiences helped to provide a record of the history of the many Arkansans who joined the westward movement. The Arkansas Gazette of May 14, 1852, noted that “it is calculated that out of every 100 persons who have gone to California, fifty have been ruined, forty no better than they would have been had they stayed at home, five a little better, and four still better, and one has made a fortune.”

October 11, 1919

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) held a press conference in New York in order to publicly condemn the events of the Elaine Massacre. Governor Charles Brough, in response to the actions of the NAACP, tried to prevent the NAACP’s magazine Crisis, as well as the black-owned newspaper the Chicago Defender, from being distributed in Arkansas.

October 11, 1948

Harrison (Boone County) native John Paul Hammerschmidt married Virginia “Ginny” Ann Sharp of Bellefonte (Boone County) following his release from the army and graduation from Oklahoma A&M College. Hammerschmidt was to become the first Republican elected to Congress since Reconstruction days. Before his marriage, Hammerschmidt had received an appointment to the naval academy, requested and was granted a transfer to West Point, attended the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) during the interim, then decided to forego attendance at West Point to join the Army Air Corps after Pearl Harbor was bombed. Their marriage lasted for fifty-eight years until Virginia’s death in 2006.

October 11, 1975

Hope (Hempstead County) native Bill Clinton married Hillary Rodham of Park Ridge, Illinois, while they were both teaching law at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County). In 1978, Clinton became the second-youngest governor in Arkansas history at the age of thirty-two and was elected president of the United States in 1992 and again in 1996. Nearing the end of her time as the nation’s first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton was elected to the U.S. Senate seat from New York in November 2000. She ran unsuccessfully for U.S. president in 2008 and then became secretary of state in the Obama administration; she also ran unsuccessfully for president in 2016.

October 12, 1836

Hiram Abiff Whittington married Mary Burnham in Boston, Massachusetts. They later moved back to Hot Springs (Garland County) and lived in the “Magnolia House,” the present-day site of the Majestic Hotel. Whittington is known today for his establishment of Arkansas’s first lending library. He also served as a state representative, and his letters home to Boston are a valuable source of information about early frontier Arkansas.

October 12, 1887

A murder trial involving Bass Reeves, thought by most to be one of the first African Americans to receive a commission as a U.S. deputy marshal west of the Mississippi River, began in Judge Isaac Parker’s court in Fort Smith (Sebastian County). Reeves had been Parker’s deputy marshal. Later that month, after being found not guilty in the death of William Leach, he returned to work as deputy marshal. He had been rumored to be of considerable wealth, but after the trial, most of his life savings had been depleted. Financially, he never recovered from this ordeal.

October 12, 1924

Futha Cone Magie, who became a pioneer in community journalism in Arkansas and used his journalistic abilities for the betterment of his community, was born in England (Lonoke County). His career in journalism began when he was eight years old and worked as a carrier for the Arkansas Gazette. After military service, he attended the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County). He worked for a few years with other publishing entities and then bought a newspaper in Cabot (Lonoke County), a city where he lived the rest of his life. He and his wife subsequently bought and published several local newspapers. In 2002, the Arkansas Press Association gave him the Distinguished Service Award, and he was inducted into UA’s Alumni Society Hall of Honor.

October 12, 1938

Variety published a review for the film Down in “Arkansaw.” B-movie studio Republic Pictures shot hillbilly situation comedy Down in “Arkansaw” (1938) in California. The only Arkansan in the film was Pinky Tomlin, who was born in Eros (Marion County) but raised in Oklahoma. The reviewer dismissed Nick Grinde’s direction as “slow and unimaginative” and said the Weaver Brothers “aren’t half as funny on the screen as they are on the stage.”

October 12, 1942

Training officially began at Walnut Ridge Army Flying School with students training on the BT-13. In late September, the Southeast Training Command had clarified confusion over whether the site would become a glider school by announcing that twenty cadets from Camden (Ouachita County) and 102 cadets and three student officers from Decatur, Alabama, would be sent to Walnut Ridge for basic flight training, and the glider program was to be established at Stuttgart. In less than two years, 5,310 students entered training, and 4,641 graduated. Forty-two students and instructors died in training.

October 12, 1963

William (Bill) Hansen, a longtime political activist and the first director of the Arkansas Project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), married Ruthe Buffington, a black woman from Arkansas, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Because interracial marriage was then illegal in Arkansas, the union caused consternation on the part of many locals. Hansen received a great deal of publicity—much of it negative—from the local media. He was also a prominent target for Arkansas law officials. By his own count, Hansen was arrested forty-five times while working as a civil rights activist. In fact, he recalled being imprisoned in Helena (Phillips County) on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.

October 13, 1864

The Fort Smith Expedition ended. At this point of the Civil War, reliable communication between the garrisons at Fort Smith (Sebastian County) and Little Rock (Pulaski County) required substantial forces like this expedition. The expedition was ultimately deemed to be a success, as it both accomplished its mission of communicating with Fort Smith and also returned with intelligence gathered along the Arkansas River Valley.

October 13, 1874

Voters ratified the new Arkansas state constitution and elected a slate of Democrats to office, thus bringing an end to Reconstruction. The new constitution replaced the one ratified in 1868, which, written and promoted primarily by Republicans and carpetbaggers, had allowed Arkansas to rejoin the Union after the Civil War.

October 13, 1884

Charles M. McDermott died of a spinal disease at his home on Bayou Bartholomew in Dermott (Chicot County), the community that bears his name. McDermott was a doctor, minister, plantation owner, Greek scholar, charter member of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, and inventor. His patented inventions include an iron wedge, an iron hoe, a cotton-picking machine, and a “flying machine.” When the Wright brothers made their successful fifty-nine-second flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, two men in the audience are believed to have said, “Why, that’s Charlie McDermott’s machine!” After the Wright brothers’ flight, an article in the Scientific American described McDermott’s machine and accredited his plans to their success.

October 13, 1933

Devil’s Den State Park in the Boston Mountains of northwest Arkansas was created. It is one of the best-preserved Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) park developments in the United States and contains the largest sandstone crevice cave area in the country. The park is popular for a variety of recreational opportunities and was designated a Natural Area by the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission.

October 13, 1936

Pioneer cinematographer Freeman Harrison Owens received the patent on the method of drawing and photographing stereoscopic pictures in relief (3-D technology). The patent was later bought by Entertaining Comics (EC) publisher Bill Gaines. Owens is credited with 11,812 inventions, among them the A.C. Nielsen Rating System, a plastic lens for Kodak, and the method of adding synchronized sound to film.

October 13, 1970

The red-cockaded woodpecker was designated as endangered. With the exception of the recently rediscovered ivory-billed woodpecker (in 2004), red-cockaded woodpeckers are the rarest of Arkansas’s nesting woodpeckers. Arkansas’s best opportunity for recovery of the red-cockaded woodpecker involves the USDA Forest Service’s Pine-Bluestem Project on more than 200,000 acres of the Ouachita National Forest in western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma. While many Arkansas populations have continued to decline, efforts on the Ouachita National Forest have led to a slow recovery. From thirty-two birds in 1990, the population was at least eighty-seven by 2005.

October 14, 1887

The first town council meeting in Sheridan (Grant County) was held in the courthouse. A brick courthouse built in 1909 at a cost of $55,340 was condemned as unsafe during the 1960s and was replaced in 1964. The courthouse is positioned in the center of Sheridan and serves as a symbol of Grant County. Sheridan, which lies approximately thirty-four miles south of Little Rock (Pulaski County), was named after Union general Philip Sheridan when the town was incorporated twenty-two years after the Civil War. In the twenty-first century, Sheridan is a growing community with expanding industries and has one of the state’s largest school districts.

October 14, 1893

Lois Lenski, who visited northeast Arkansas after an invitation from schoolchildren who had heard her read one of her books on the radio, was born in Springfield, Ohio. Lenski was certified as a teacher but spent most of her early career illustrating other people’s books until a publisher encouraged her to write her own stories. She visited Mississippi County in the spring and fall of 1947 after the invitation from children in an elementary classroom in Yarbo (Mississippi County), and she inscribed her first book about sharecroppers, Cotton in My Sack, “for my beloved Arkansas cotton children.” She wrote two other books, Houseboat Girl and We Live by the River, about life in that area.

October 14, 1918

William E. Davis was born in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Davis distinguished himself as a commercial photographer for forty years and began working as a fine art photographer in 1983. Davis has had aesthetic connections with photographers on the West Coast and has worked almost exclusively in Arkansas. The photographer was honored with a one-person, sixty-seven-image exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center from October 6 through November 26, 2000.

October 14, 1936

Arkansas Children’s Hospital was fully accredited by the American College of Surgeons, which had withdrawn its approval of the hospital several years earlier. Ruth Olive Beall was superintendent of Arkansas Children’s Hospital and Home from 1934 to 1961. She was largely responsible for the hospital’s survival during the financial difficulties of the Great Depression and for its expansion and improvement in the following years.

October 14, 1959

Jazz pianist Alphonso “Phonnie” Trent died of a heart attack in Fort Smith (Sebastian County). Trent was a renowned jazz pianist and band leader who led the Alphonso Trent Orchestra, a group of young African-American musicians who toured the country, made several recordings, and had a lengthy engagement at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, Texas.

October 15, 1827

Lafayette County was formed out of Hempstead County. Its original borders were the Ouachita River on the east, Louisiana to the south, Hempstead County to the north, and Texas to the west. It was named for the Marquis de Lafayette, a French ally of the United States in the Revolutionary War. Lafayette County has always been important to the history of Arkansas, but it was particularly so from its first four decades as a territory through the Civil War. This was partly because one of its residents, James Sevier Conway, was the state’s first governor.

October 15, 1873

The Arkansas Press Association was established “to promote the interests of the press by securing unity of thought and action in relation to the profession of journalism and the business of publishing, to elevate its tone, purify its expressions, enlarge its usefulness, advance it in wisdom and justice, extend its influence in the work of true civilization, and to cultivate friendly relations and a spirit of fraternal regard among its members.” It is the oldest trade association in Arkansas.

October 15, 1902

Otis Theodore Wingo and Effiegene Locke were married. Wingo later served as a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives. After he died on October 21, 1930, his wife was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, serving until 1933.

October 15, 1902

Effiegene Locke married Otis Theodore Wingo, a lawyer and banker who had moved from Tennessee to De Queen (Sevier County). The couple had two children, Janie Blanche Wingo and Otis T. Wingo Jr. The family lived in De Queen until 1912 when Otis Sr. was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Arkansas’s Fourth Congressional District. In 1930, Effiegene Wingo also began her service in the U.S. House of Representatives. She was the second of only four women from Arkansas to be elected to the position.

October 15, 1913

Nationally prominent African-American leader Booker T. Washington delivered the dedication speech for the recently completed Mosaic Templars of America building at the corner of 9th Street and Broadway to a crowd of more than 2,000 citizens—black and white. The Mosaic Templars of America was a hugely successful African-American fraternal organization founded in 1882 by two former slaves. The Mosaic Templars assisted black citizens who were unable to obtain insurance from other established organizations because of the racial policies of the time.

October 15, 1921

Pollard (Clay County) was incorporated. Pollard is a located in Clay County, a few miles west of Piggott (Clay County) on U.S. Highway 62, in the foothills of Crowley’s Ridge. Pollard has witnessed the emergence and decline of the railroad and the timber industry; its focus in the twenty-first century is on local agriculture.

October 15, 1927

Robert Stobaugh was born in McGehee (Desha County). Stobaugh was an authority on energy, international business, and corporate governance who served as a professor in the Harvard Business School. His 1979 book, Energy Future: The Report of the Energy Project, led to significant initiatives in energy policy by the Carter administration and became a New York Times bestseller.

October 15, 1948

Governor Ben Laney proclaimed the first annual Poetry Day in Arkansas in recognition of the tireless efforts of Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni to encourage the appreciation of poetry and poets. Governor Winthrop Rockefeller proclaimed this date to be Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni Day. Marinoni, a native of Italy, was a prolific writer of poetry and short stories and was a fervent promoter of her adopted home state of Arkansas.

October 15, 1969

Governor Winthrop Rockefeller proclaimed this date, on which Poetry Day is observed, to be Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni Day. Rosa Marinoni had been designated poet laureate of Arkansas in 1953 by act of the General Assembly, and she held that title until her death in 1970. She was a native of Italy who lived in Fayetteville (Washington County) and was married to a university professor. She was a prolific writer and an enthusiastic promoter of the state of Arkansas.

October 16, 1799

Future eighth governor of Arkansas, Isaac Murphy, was born outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He became nationally famous when, at the Arkansas Secession Convention on May 6, 1861, he not only voted against secession but also resolutely refused to change his vote despite enormous crowd pressure. In 1864, he became the first elected governor of Union-controlled Arkansas.

October 16, 1804

Explorers William Dunbar and Dr. George Hunter departed from St. Catherine’s Landing on the east bank of the Mississippi River to explore the Ouachita River in the new Louisiana Purchase, of which Arkansas was a part. The reports the explorers sent describing the landscapes and people of the area were the first details of the newly acquired territory to reach Thomas Jefferson.

October 16, 1875

Conway, the seat of Faulkner County, incorporated. Conway was named for a famous Arkansas family that included the state’s first elected governor, James Sevier Conway. Controversies surrounding the creation of Faulkner County in 1873 and the choice of Conway as its seat continued for many years (partially as a lingering effect of the Brooks-Baxter War). Eventually, the town and Faulkner County became home to large German and Irish populations. A fire in 1878 destroyed a large part of Conway. Involved in rebuilding Conway was George Washington Donaghey, later the twenty-second governor of Arkansas.

October 16, 1916

According to an article in the Arkansas Democrat, membership in the women’s suffrage movement had increased and gained momentum significantly during the past few years. In October 1914, a state convention in Little Rock (Pulaski County) had officially organized the Arkansas Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). The Political Equality League joined with the Federation of Women’s Clubs, and once again, a women’s suffrage amendment was proposed for the Arkansas constitution. This time, the amendment passed. However, four amendments were to be voted on, but according to state law, only three could go before the public. Therefore, the women’s suffrage amendment ultimately failed, just as the previous one had in 1911.

October 16, 1940

Conscription under the Selective Training and Service Act, preceding America’s entrance into World War II, began. Churches such as the Society of Friends (Quakers), Mennonites, and Church of the Brethren, which opposed military service on grounds of religious and personal belief, organized as the National Council of Religious and Conscientious Objectors and began working with the government to oversee placement of conscientious objectors. Camp Magnolia was established in Magnolia (Columbia County) on the site of a former Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp in June 1941 as one of the centers for people accepted into the Civilian Public Service work. This work was similar to that done by the CCC. Of the 400 men who served there, only nine were from Arkansas.

October 17, 1828

Sevier County was established. Named after Ambrose H. Sevier, a U.S. senator from Arkansas, its county seat is De Queen. Sevier County is located in southwest Arkansas and borders the state of Oklahoma. The county is located at the northern limits of the Gulf Coastal Plain. Sevier County has four rivers, each of which is impounded by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lake. The Little River forms the southern boundary, while the Saline River borders the east side of the county. The Cossatot River and Rolling Fork River both flow from north to south.

October 17, 1871

Thad Caraway was born in Spring Hill, Missouri. After his father’s death when Caraway was a young child, his mother struggled to maintain the family. She moved the family to Clay County, Arkansas, when he was twelve. Caraway went on to become an Arkansas prosecuting attorney who was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives four times and to the U.S. Senate twice. A progressive champion of the poor, Caraway vigorously challenged corruption while aiding Arkansas during the beginning of the Great Depression. His wife, Hattie Wyatt Caraway, filled his Senate seat after his death on November 6, 1931.

October 17, 1895

The town of Maynard (Randolph County) was incorporated. Maynard is located at the intersection of State Highways 328 and 115. The town is known for its academic heritage and for preserving the history of the area with the Maynard Pioneer Park and Museum.

October 17, 1906

Kentucky native James David Walker fell down the stairs in the building where his law practice was located, fracturing his skull; he died a few hours later. Walker served as a U.S. senator from Arkansas from 1879 to 1885. Before that, he served as a judge and as a colonel in the Confederate army. Local historian William Campbell later described him as “a man of strong convictions, sturdy honesty, high principles, and the recognized leader of the bar,” adding that his “knowledge and use of the law was profound, and his pleading before juries was always persuasive.” He had little impact in the Senate, however.

October 17, 1906

John Calvin “Toby” Munn was born in Prescott (Nevada County). Munn was a commander in the Pacific Theater of World War II and a pioneer among U.S. Marine aviators who perfected the use of aircraft carriers for combat operations. After the war, he was responsible for securing the major Japanese Yokosuka Naval Base, which became the largest U.S. naval base in the Far East. During his career, he continued to guide the improvement of U.S. Marine air capabilities, and he rose to the top echelon of marine leadership as the assistant commandant of the United States Marine Corps.

October 17, 1933

An unknown assailant tried unsuccessfully to assassinate Baptist minister Dale Crowley by thrusting a machine gun through the bars of the cell at the Craighead County Jail where Crowley was being held and firing it. Crowley was being held for the murder of J. W. McMurdo. Seven days previous, Crowley, leader of the Jonesboro Baptist Church, shot and killed McMurdo, who had been hired as a watchman by a competing faction within the church community. Crowley had shown up at the church to claim possession of the tabernacle following a court ruling in his favor. This incident was part of a series of violent conflicts between various factions in the Baptist community of Jonesboro (Craighead County) now known as the Jonesboro Church Wars.

October 17, 1997

The Drew County Courthouse was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The courthouse was nominated for its architectural significance as the best example of a Classical Moderne–style building in the area. The Drew County Courthouse, located at 210 South Main Street in Monticello (Drew County), is a three-and-a-half-story Classical Moderne–style building that was constructed in 1932. This is the fourth courthouse building that has been constructed for Drew County.

October 18, 1820

The Choctaw reluctantly agreed to move to Arkansas by agreeing to the Treaty of Doak’s Stand in Mississippi. The United States’ representative at the treaty negotiations, future president Andrew Jackson, paid little attention to the map and agreed to transfer to the Choctaw Nation a large part of southwest Arkansas—at part that already had been surveyed and sold by the U.S. government to settlers. This caused an uproar resulting in several other treaties, one of which left Fort Smith (Sebastian County) in Oklahoma.

October 18, 1820

Crawford County was created, encompassing a large part of Indian Territory and all or part of five present-day counties—Scott, Sebastian, Franklin, Washington, and Pope. It was named to honor William H. Crawford of Georgia, who was then the secretary of the treasury. Due to the extensive geographical area, it was often referred to as the “empire county.” Modern-day Crawford County is situated in northwest Arkansas in the Ozark Mountains. The Boston Mountains to the north and the Arkansas River Valley to the south provide a diverse landscape and play an important role in the economy. The county is centrally located within the nation, thus allowing desirable north-south and east-west transportation networks to support industrialization, manufacturing, and tourism growth.

October 18, 1917

Mamie Phipps Clark, the first African-American woman to earn a Doctor of Philosophy degree in psychology from Columbia University, was born in Hot Springs (Garland County). The research she did with her husband was important in the success of the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared the doctrine of “separate but equal” with regard to education to be unconstitutional because such separation generated “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community” on the part of African-American students.

October 18, 1964

Winthrop Rockefeller opened the Museum of Automobiles with thirty-three cars on display, some of them his own, along with others from the Rockefeller family. When Rockefeller made Arkansas his home in 1953, he had developed Winrock Farms on Petit Jean Mountain. In 1961, he purchased a collection of fine antique and classic cars from the James Melton museum of Hypoluxo, Florida. He had a building constructed on Petit Jean Mountain to house the cars and named it the Museum of Automobiles. The museum is located atop Petit Jean Mountain in Conway County. It is primarily dedicated to the exhibition of quality antique and vintage automobiles, as well as related items for the cultural and educational benefit of the general public.

October 18, 1976

The Franklin County Courthouse in Charleston was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Located at 607 East Main Street, the Franklin County Courthouse for the Southern District was constructed as a two-story structure fashioned in Classical Revival Style. The courthouse is a two-and-a-half-story red brick, rectangular building with a flat roof. The brick pilasters divide the building into bays and add dimension to its surface. The second-story fan windows soften the sharp design lines.

October 18, 1986

The Cotter Bridge (officially named the R. M. Ruthven Bridge) was dedicated as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990. A four-lane bridge that was opened north of Cotter (Baxter County) for U.S. Highway 62/412 was supposed to replace the Cotter Bridge, but local protests saved it. It was renovated and reopened in 2004. Completed in 1930, the bridge is located near Cotter on the business route of U.S. Highway 62 and crosses the White River between Baxter and Marion counties. It is recognizable for its Rainbow Arches.

October 19, 1876

The community of Marvell in Phillips County was incorporated. Marvell began as a railroad town in the 1870s and became one of the largest communities in Phillips County. It is best known as the hometown of musician Levon Helm.