Days in AR History - Starting with F

Art Porter Sr. was born in Little Rock (Pulaski County) to Eugene Porter Sr., a stonemason, and Lillie Mae Porter, who gave Porter his first music lessons. He played in church at age eight and gave his first recital at age twelve. By the age of fourteen, he conducted a half-hour classical music radio program from KLRA-AM in Little Rock. Porter became a popular and respected musician of jazz, classical, and spiritual music and entertained several heads of state. He also performed at two of Bill Clinton’s inaugurations as governor and one of his presidential inaugurations. Porter’s musical legacy was passed on to Art Porter Jr., whose career, expressed in four albums, ended with his accidental death on November 23, 1996.

African-American composer William Grant Still married Verna Arvey just two days after he divorced Grace Bundy. The marriage took place in Mexico, where interracial marriages were legal. Still, who grew up in Little Rock (Pulaski County), achieved national and international acclaim as a composer of symphonic and popular music.

Mary Steenburgen was born in Newport (Jackson County) to Maurice Steenburgen, a freight train conductor, and Nellie Mae Wall Steenburgen, a school secretary. Steenburgen is one of Arkansas’s most celebrated actors, as well as an advocate for many social and political causes. Noted for roles in cinema, television, and stage, she has portrayed a wide range of characters, from the president’s mother, Hannah Nixon, in Nixon (1995) to schoolteacher Clara Clayton in Back to the Future III (1990) to seductress Betty Carver in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). She has won many awards, including an Academy Award for her portrayal of Lynda Dummar in Melvin and Howard (1980).

William T. Dillard died at the age of eighty-seven. Dillard, who was born in Mineral Springs (Howard County), was the founder of Dillard’s, Inc., one of the nation’s largest fashion apparel and home-furnishings retailers. From an $8,000 investment in a single store in Nashville (Howard County), Dillard built a premier retail chain with more than 300 stores in twenty-nine states. In 1999, Dillard was among the first four Arkansas business leaders inducted into the Arkansas Business Hall of Fame. Dillard often said, “Business without integrity is not good business—and in the long run will not be successful.”

The Cairo and Fulton Railroad was chartered by the State of Arkansas to build a railroad line from the Arkansas-Missouri state line across Arkansas to Texas. The line still exists as today’s Union Pacific Railroad line from the Missouri state line through Little Rock (Pulaski County) to Texarkana (Miller County). Over a period of more than 100 years, the Cairo and Fulton merged first into the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern (StLIM&S), then into the Missouri Pacific, and finally into today’s Union Pacific. As the first railroad to connect Arkansas to Missouri and the eastern United States, the Cairo and Fulton opened up the state for development.

The Scout from Pine Bluff to DeValls Bluff began. This scout was typical of many such operations carried out by the Union army during the duration of the war. Facing minor organized resistance, the Federal troopers easily defeated the small guerrilla bands opposing them. Skirmishes such as this were typical in the last days of the Civil War in Arkansas.

President Ulysses S. Grant signed a joint resolution of the Forty-first Congress directing the government to ascertain “whether any diminution in the number of food fishes of the coast and lakes of the United States has taken place; and, if so, to what causes the same is due; and also whether any and what protective, prohibitory, or precautionary measures should be adopted in the premises.” This resolution caused the formation of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service under the administration of the Department of the Interior.

Clyde Ellis of Garfield (Benton County) died. He served in both houses of the state legislature and was the United States representative for the Third District from 1939 to 1943. Ellis vigorously promoted the cause of rural electric co-ops and was the first general manager of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, a New Deal agency designed to bring electricity to rural America. He was widely seen as the greatest advocate of rural electrification in the United States.

Benton County native Clyde Taylor Ellis died in Washington DC; he is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia. Ellis was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and a pioneer in the nation’s rural electrification movement. He served as the first general manager of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), which was formed to help promote and protect the interests of the rural electrification program, a New Deal program created in 1935.

Bill Fulbright died of a massive stroke at his home in Washington DC. He is buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Fayetteville (Washington County). The themes that dominated Fulbright’s public life and work were cultural tolerance and international cooperation. During his thirty-two years in Congress as Democratic senator from Arkansas, the former Rhodes scholar appealed to the peoples of the world but particularly his countrymen to appreciate and tolerate other cultures and political systems without condoning armed aggression or human rights violations.