Days in AR History - Starting with D

U. M. Rose, a nationally prominent attorney who practiced in Little Rock (Pulaski County) for more than forty years at what is now the Rose Law Firm, moved to Batesville (Independence County) because he found the cold winters of his native Kentucky especially difficult.

Sonny Boy Williamson was born in Glendora, Mississippi (although the exact year of his birth and many other dates in his life are difficult to verify). He first became famous as a blues harmonica player in 1941 on the groundbreaking King Biscuit Time radio program broadcast by station KFFA in Helena (Phillips County). Williamson’s fame spread through Europe in the 1960s and has continued to grow since his death. An annual blues festival in Helena still features his music.

Little Rock native Jerry Lewis Russell Jr. died. Russell was an author, editor of several newsletters, political and public relations advisor and consultant, political activist, and founder of the Civil War Roundtable of Arkansas. He was also nationally recognized as a leader in the preservation of state and national Civil War battlefields.

Calhoun County was founded, named after John C. Calhoun, vice president of the United States. Its county seat is Hampton. The county has only four incorporated towns or cities, but it is home to many archaeological sites dating from before the time of European exploration. Known for cotton production in the nineteenth century, modern-day Calhoun County produces timber, sand, and gravel. Its population density of 7.5 people per square mile, per the 2020 census, makes it the most sparsely populated of Arkansas’s seventy-five counties.

William Nelson Rector Beall was paroled. Beall served as a Confederate brigadier general from Arkansas during the Civil War. He most notably served as an agent for the Confederate government to raise funds to purchase supplies for Confederate troops held in Federal prisons. Beall and other captured officers were sent to Memphis, where he spent time in the hospital recovering from sickness. Eventually, Beall and many of his fellow officers arrived at Johnson’s Island, Ohio, located on Lake Erie. Beall quickly became involved in relief efforts. In an effort to supply Confederate troops held in Union prison camps across the North, Beall was appointed as chief receiving agent in a scheme that allowed Confederate cotton to be sold in the North or to European countries, with the proceeds used for prisoner welfare.

Antiquities collector Edwin Curtiss died of a sudden heart attack in Nashville, Tennessee. Curtiss was a nonprofessional field man who excavated archaeological sites in Arkansas. He is credited by Arkansas archaeologists with making the first scientific archaeological excavation in the state.

Writer Douglas C. Jones was born in Winslow (Washington County). Over three decades, Jones, a career military officer turned award-winning novelist, wrote more than a dozen books—including his bestselling The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer (1976)—that dealt with everything from the American Revolution and the opening of the Western frontier to the Spanish-American War, assorted Native American conflicts, and the Great Depression. His tales, most of which were either set in Arkansas or featured Arkansan protagonists, were spirited and sprawling, his historical backdrops vividly portrayed, and his characters brutal or benevolent in measures consistent with their times and circumstances.

John Brown Watson, president of Agricultural, Mechanical, and Normal College (AM&N) from 1928 until the end of his life, died at his home on the AM&N campus. AM&N enrollment at the beginning of Watson’s tenure was thirty-six students; the number of faculty and staff was thirty-two. At the time of United States’ entry into World War II, the college enrolled almost 500 students and employed a faculty of sixty-six. AM&N is now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB).

Kevin Brockmeier was born in Hialeah, Florida. His family moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1976. A precocious child with a vivid imagination, he spoke in full sentences at the age of two and was writing mysteries at eight. He is a publisher and award-winning novelist and short story writer, and has been described as one of “America’s best practitioners of fabulist fiction.” His work has been published in many national publications and has won Arkansas’s top literary prizes: the Porter Fund Award for Literary Excellence and the Worthen Prize. He has also been awarded several O. Henry prizes.

A headline in a Time magazine article about Paul Peacher’s peonage conviction read “Slavery in Arkansas.” The year 1936 saw two notable instances of such “slavery”: Paul Peacher, a deputy sheriff of Crittenden County who had his own farming operation on the side, was revealed to be engaging in peonage, and a gang of white riding bosses and planters entered the Providence Methodist Church outside of Earle (Crittenden County) where 450 African-American sharecroppers were gathered for a meeting of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and began beating them with ax handles and pistol butts.

Melba Pattillo Beals, one of the Little Rock Nine, was born in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Her first-hand account of the desegregation of Central High School was published in 1994 as Warriors Don’t Cry. She was the first of the Little Rock Nine to have written a book based on her experience. The sequel, White is a State of Mind, follows Beals through her senior year and into college and family days.

Orders for Little Rock (Pulaski County) native Rear Admiral Corydon McAlmont Wassell to leave San Francisco for a new post in the Philippines were changed because of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The ship was rerouted to Java in the Netherlands East India (now Indonesia). In Java, while treating wounded servicemen from battleships badly damaged by Japanese forces, Wassell elected to remain there with non-ambulatory patients who were denied transport on evacuation ships. His courage and leadership led to his decoration with the Navy Cross and recognition by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in one of his fireside chats. His leadership there made him one of the first national heroes of World War II.

The first soldiers arrived at Camp Chaffee (which later became Fort Chaffee), the same day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Fort Chaffee, just outside of Fort Smith (Sebastian County) and Barling (Sebastian County) on Arkansas Highway 22, has served the United States as an army training camp, a prisoner-of-war camp, and a refugee camp. Currently, 66,000 acres are used by the Arkansas National Guard, with the Arkansas Air National Guard using the fort’s Razorback Range for target practice. Construction on Camp Chaffee had begun on September 9, 1941, as part of the Department of War’s preparations to double the size of the army in the face of imminent war. The camp was named after Major General Adna R. Chaffee Jr.

The Cleveland Orchestra premiered William Grant Still’s Poem for Orchestra. 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 a strong advocate for the performance of works by American composers.

An article in the Washington (Arkansas) Telegraph first attributed the invention of the bowie knife to James Black of Washington (Hempstead County), who claimed to have made a knife for Jim Bowie. Black’s knives, embellished with silver plating, became the most copied of all bowie knives. The connection of these knives to Arkansas, and the state’s reputation for the use of the blade, inspired alternative terms to “bowie knife.” “Arkansas knife” and then “Arkansas toothpick” were used synonymously for the bowie knife in the antebellum period. The state’s reputation suffered because of its association with violence and the “toothpick,” and some people called Arkansas the “toothpick state.”

The town site that became Texarkana (Miller County) was established with the sale of lots at the place where the Cairo and Fulton Railroad tracks would meet the Texas and Pacific Railroad. The town’s name may have existed before the town, as some say that, as early as 1860, it was used by the steamboat Texarkana, which traveled the Red River. The most popular version of the town’s naming credits a railroad surveyor, Colonel Gus Knobel, who came to the state line between Arkansas and Texas, and, believing he was also near the Louisiana border, wrote “TEX-ARK-ANA” on a board and nailed it to a tree with the statement, “This is the name of a town which is to be built here.”

A group of businessmen organized the Little Rock Junction Railway Company to build a bridge connecting the Little Rock and Fort Smith rail line with the Little Rock, Mississippi River and Texas railway. The Arkansas Democrat of December 10, 1883, reported that “while the bridge will pass over the historic ‘Little Rock,’ from which this city takes its name, it will be necessary to remove but a small portion of the point” to make the wall necessary for the function of the swing span. The company did not rely on the congressional sanction of the old Little Rock Bridge Company, so the Corps of Engineers claimed not to have the authority to approve or disapprove the plans for the Junction Bridge.

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, was born the seventh son of Norma Blau Andrews and George Willis Andrews, who had a farm on Spavinaw Creek in rural Benton County seven miles from the town of Gravette. Before his move to Hollywood, he was a comedian and musician in tent shows traveling throughout the mid-South. In his later years, he was a featured guest at film festivals. He was a member of the Screen Actors Guild and a lifetime member of Musicians Local 47 of Hollywood, California.

Millwood Dam was formally dedicated. Millwood Dam, which impounds Millwood Lake on the Little River, was constructed between 1961 and 1966 at a cost of $46.1 million as part of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) project to control flooding on the lower Red River, into which the Little River empties near the town of Fulton (Hempstead County). The lake created by the dam spills across the borders of four counties—Sevier, Little River, Howard, and Hempstead—and provides a variety of recreational opportunities for southwestern Arkansas. The 3.3-mile-long, earthen Millwood Dam is the longest of its kind in Arkansas.

Bradley Bunch was born in Overton County, Tennessee. Bunch was a longtime Arkansas legislator, Carroll County judge, and the first historian of Carroll County. In addition, he is the fourth-great-uncle of Barack Obama, the forty-fourth president of the United States, whom he markedly resembles.

Montgomery County was founded. It was named after Richard Montgomery, a general in the Revolutionary War, and has its county seat at Mount Ida. Montgomery County is noted for its quartz crystal deposits, the rugged beauty of the Ouachita Mountains, and its sparkling, clear waters.

The Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad was reorganized as the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railway. The line was ultimately purchased in 1882 by New York financier Jay Gould and combined with the Saint Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway to make the largest railroad system in Arkansas at the time.

J. M. C. Southard, a local civic leader, surveyed and platted a town he called Minersville near a rail terminus in Independence County. The community—later renamed Cushman in honor of the railroad vice president and operations officer of the Iron Mountain Railway, which carried passengers from Cushman to Newport and returned daily—was the center of a valuable manganese mining industry and was an important shipping and trade center for the next seventy-two years.

Carl Cordell Jr. was born in Benton (Saline County). Few figures are more recognized in the multi-billion-dollar sportfishing industry than Cordell, who built a fishing tackle empire based in Hot Springs (Garland County) that grew to be the largest in America. Cordell was inducted into the National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Arkansas Outdoor Hall of Fame in 1997. He was inducted into the Bass Fishing Hall of Fame in 2002.