Days in AR History - Starting with N

Dandridge McRae was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. McRae went on to command a brigade at the December 7, 1862, Battle of Prairie Grove (Washington County) and at Helena (Phillips County) on July 4, 1863. Following the Battle of Helena, General Theophilus H. Holmes, the Confederate commander at Helena, accused McRae of “misbehavior before the enemy” for allegedly failing to make an attack. A court of inquiry disagreed, clearing McRae of all charges. After the war, McRae returned to Searcy and resumed his law practice, which he continued until 1881, when he became deputy secretary of state. The town of McRae (White County) is named in his honor.

James Camp Tappan was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Tappan had joined the Confederate army and was commissioned colonel of the Thirteenth Arkansas Infantry Regiment in May 1861. The Thirteenth Arkansas first saw action under Tappan at the Battle of Belmont, Missouri, under the command of General Leonidas Polk, who commended Tappan on his military skills during the engagement. Tappan was a Confederate general, lawyer, and politician from Helena (Phillips County). After the war, he established a law firm in Helena (Phillips County) with Major J. J. Horner and was reelected to the state House of Representatives in 1897, serving until 1900, including a stint as speaker of the house from 1897 to 1898.

Lucien Coatsworth Gause died in Jacksonport (Jackson County). Gause was a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He represented the First District of Arkansas in the Forty-Fourth and Forty-Fifth Congresses, serving from 1875 to 1879.

Scholar and linguist Ben Kimpel was born in Fort Smith (Sebastian County). A professor of English at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), Kimpel wrote the definitive biography of the eighteenth-century novelist Samuel Richardson with UA colleague Duncan Eaves.

Geologist George William Featherstonhaugh married Sarah Duane of Schenectady, New York. Featherstonhaugh was appointed to make a geological survey of Arkansas, and as he did, he recorded life in the early Arkansas Territory, later publishing his observations as Excursion Through the Slave States.

Nathaniel “Preacher” Doke married his second wife, sixteen-year-old Charlotte House, in Bloomfield, Indiana. Doke was a Benton County pioneer, evangelist, entrepreneur, and benefactor. The Methodist exhorter “talked from his heels” in a sincere, convincing manner and was also a master carpenter, blacksmith, farmer, hunter, and fiddler. By the turn of the century, Doke had married for the third time and fathered a total of twenty-three children, six of whom were borne by House.

B. S. Petefish organized the first Polk County Possum Club banquet, which was held at the Hotel Mena. The “sumptuous meal” featured baked opossums (commonly called “possums”) and all the trimmings, with a dash of “fun, nonsense and good fellowship.” The Polk County Possum Club began with a challenge issued to local hunters of opossums in 1913 and henceforth hosted yearly banquets of opossum meat and side dishes until 1947, though it was active again for five years in the 1990s.

By a margin of 108,991 to 63,406, Arkansas voters approved a proposed amendment to the Arkansas constitution to outlaw the teaching of the theory of evolution in any school that received state funds. Passage of this act made Arkansas the only state in the Union to outlaw such teaching by initiated act.

Overflow National Wildlife Refuge was established to protect one of the remaining bottomland hardwood forest tracts in the Lower Mississippi River Valley. Located in Ashley County, it is part of the National Wildlife Refuge System administered by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service under the Department of the Interior. These bottomland forests are used by a huge contingent of migratory birds including waterfowl, wading birds, raptors, and songbirds. Original refuge land acquisitions were limited to forested bottomlands only, as they were in eminent danger of being drained and cleared for agriculture. The refuge has been officially designated a globally Important Bird Area (IBA) by the American Bird Conservancy.

The future Philander Smith College began as Walden Seminary in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Named for Freedmen’s Bureau activist John Walden and located in the Wesley Chapel Methodist Church at 8th Street and Broadway, it was designed to educate black ministers. The Reverend Thomas Mason, its first president (serving from November 1881 to May 1897), moved the school in 1882 to a new campus at 10th and Center streets. This move was made possible by a public plea for gifts to the school. Responding to an article published in the Christian Advocate in 1882, Adeline Smith of Oak Park, Illinois—the widow of Philander Smith, “a liberal giver to Asiatic Missions”—donated $10,500 to Walden Seminary, which was promptly renamed Philander Smith College.

Jack Fleck was born on the outskirts of Bettendorf, Iowa. Fleck won one of most improbable victories in golf history with his 1955 U.S. Open playoff victory over perennial golfing great Ben Hogan, an established star on the Professional Golf Association (PGA) Tour who had previously won four U.S. Opens. Fleck was an unknown who had been playing regularly on the PGA Tour for less than a year when he recorded his historic victory. Fleck moved to Arkansas in 1988, opening the Lil’ Bit a Heaven Golf Club in 1992.

Mike Beebe was elected Arkansas’s forty-fifth governor with an overwhelming majority of the vote. Beebe received 55.6 percent of the vote, holding Asa Hutchinson to only 40.7 percent; each of the two other candidates received approximately two percent of the vote. Beebe’s victory also had great geographical reach; he lost only fifteen of the state’s seventy-five counties. His campaign emphasized a mixture of progressivism on economic issues (strong support for reducing the state’s sales tax on groceries, for raising the state’s minimum wage, for universal access to pre-kindergarten educational opportunities, and for maintenance of the state educational standards) and traditionalism on cultural issues (strong support for private property rights and gun ownership rights).

Johnny Sain, an Arkansas-born star major league pitcher who is widely considered to have been the best pitching coach in major league baseball history, died in Downers Grove, Illinois, from complications from a stroke. He is buried in his hometown of Havana (Yell County). Sain had unique (and still controversial) approaches to working with pitchers, the success of which earned him the respect and affection of his charges. As a pitcher, he won 139 games, the third-highest total for an Arkansas native; only Dizzy Dean, with 150 victories, and Lon Warneke, with 192, won more.

The citizens of Bella Vista (Benton County) voted by a two-to-one margin for incorporation. In unison with the incorporation vote, town government elections were held for eight positions (mayor, recorder/treasurer, city attorney, and five aldermen). Census Bureau statistics show that the percentage of residents age sixty-five and older dropped in 2000 to 21.4 percent from 49.1 percent in 1990. Children of school age in Bella Vista accounted for 19.1 percent of Bentonville School District students in 2006. In 2006, the Bentonville School District began construction of an elementary school on the east side of Bella Vista to accommodate 750 students. Bella Vista has changed from a retirement community to a bedroom community, primarily for the Walmart Home Office and nearby Walmart vendor companies.

Mulberry (Crawford County) was incorporated. With the coming of the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad in 1876, a permanent settlement near its path had been desired. According to Goodspeed’s Biographical & Historical Memoirs of Northwestern Arkansas, Thomas A. Carter bought the land east of the main road to the river—a road that later became Mulberry’s Main Street—from the heirs of Allan Miller. Carter erected the first home in 1874; Quesenbury and Company built the first business house in 1876. The city was situated in Maxey Township. Mulberry was located in Franklin County until 1895, when Crawford County received the township, by act of the legislature, in exchange for building a bridge over the Mulberry River.

William Henry Grey died in Helena (Phillips County). Grey emerged as a leader of African Americans in Arkansas after he settled in Helena in 1865. His involvement in politics included being a Republican member of the 1868 state constitutional convention and a member of the Arkansas General Assembly, as well as serving as the Commissioner of Immigration and State Lands. In 1872, he became the first African American to address a national nominating convention, seconding the nomination of Republican presidential candidate Ulysses S. Grant.

The First U.S. Army Rangers Battalion went into action during World War II as part of Operation Torch under the command of Major General Lloyd Redendan. The Rangers were an elite commando unit organized and trained by then-Major William Orlando Darby from Fort Smith (Sebastian County). They served a distinguished role in the invasion of Italy and Sicily. Darby became known as an exemplary leader who received many military honors and was promoted posthumously to brigadier general, the only soldier to have received that distinction.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued a proclamation classifying the area previously known as the Eastern Arkansas Grazing Recreation Wildlife Area as the St. Francis National Forest. The land had been transferred to the U.S. Forest Service in 1954. The land covers 11,462 acres in Lee County and 9,628 acres in Phillips County for a total of 21,090 acres. The St. Francis Scenic Byway, which runs through the area, is situated in one of the nation’s smallest national forests and takes its name from the St. Francis River, a tributary of the Mississippi River, which parallels the eastern boundary of the St. Francis National Forest.

Voters approved the proposal to initiate a four-mill tax to finance construction of East Arkansas Community College (EACC), a comprehensive two-year college dedicated to meeting the educational needs of its service area in eastern Arkansas. The college, located in Forrest City (St. Francis County), has served as a leader for social and economic improvement and continued growth in the region.

Jim Guy Tucker, who later became Arkansas’s forty-third governor, married Betty Allen; they had four children. Tucker’s administration carried Arkansas from the end of the Bill Clinton administration—during which Tucker essentially acted as governor the last year because of Clinton’s campaigning for president—to the beginning of the Mike Huckabee gubernatorial administration, which remained in power long enough to be stopped only by term limits. In his personal life, Tucker weathered political challenges, survived health problems, and faced a criminal indictment.

Congressional delegate Henry Wharton Conway died from wounds he had sustained in a duel on October 29 with Territorial Secretary Robert Crittenden. The duel took place after animosities following a tumultuous campaign for Congress between Conway and Robert Oden were aggravated by supposed insults made by Conway. In the duel, which took place on the east side of the Mississippi River because dueling was illegal in Arkansas Territory, Conway’s shot grazed Crittenden’s coat, but Crittenden shot Conway in the rib, causing an injury that eventually led to his death. The Crittenden-Conway duel was just one of many between Arkansas politicians and others over the years; the practice did not end until 1863.

Susie Pryor was born in Camden (Ouachita County). She was the first woman in Arkansas to run for a political office after women obtained the vote and was one of the first women to hold a seat on a local school board. She also participated in one of the first historic preservation projects in the state, was the mother of David Pryor (who served as governor of Arkansas and U.S. senator), and was the grandmother of Mark Pryor (who served as Arkansas’s attorney general and was elected U.S. senator in 2002). She was nominated as Arkansas Woman of the Year in 1975.

Mary Frances Files Silitch, the first woman to be editor-in-chief of a national aviation magazine, was born in Little Rock (Pulaski County). A licensed pilot, she has flown 250 kinds of aircraft and logged 5,000 hours of flight. In 2006, she received the top journalism award of the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA). She is the first woman to win the NBAA Platinum Wing Lifetime Achievement Award for Journalism Excellence. On October 28, 2010, Silitch was inducted into the Arkansas Aviation Hall of Fame.

The first Arkansas Livestock Show began, held in conjunction with the Arkansas State Fair. The show was held in North Little Rock (Pulaski County) for five years on land given by the city, but after a massive fire destroyed all its buildings shortly after the end of 1942’s fair, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers seized the land for its World War II efforts. The show and fair were moved to Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) in 1943. No show or fair were held in 1944 and 1945 because of demands and shortages related to World War II. In 1945, Little Rock (Pulaski County) offered land on Roosevelt Road for the state fair.

Prominent Methodist minister, educator (elected one of the nation’s youngest college presidents), and publisher Alexander Millar died in Little Rock (Pulaski County). In addition to his tireless promotion of education, Millar advocated the conservation and development of the state’s natural resources and recommended improvements in its railroads and highways. He was chairman of the state’s first Good Roads Convention, and his activities helped lead to the state constitutional amendment authorizing counties to levy road taxes. Later, he was appointed to the state forestry commission.