Days in AR History - Starting with M

Pressure on the Western Cherokee by the federal government and the new Arkansas Territory eventually led to the Treaty of Washington, which ceded the Cherokee’s Arkansas lands to the United States. Most of the Western Cherokee moved to Indian Territory in northeast Oklahoma, leaving houses, farms, orchards, and mills to be occupied by the Anglo-Americans who came to the area.

Rabbi Ira Sanders, who became the most well-known and respected rabbi in Arkansas, was born in Rich Hill, Missouri. Sanders came to Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1926 as leader of B’Nai Israel, the state’s largest Reform Jewish Congregation. He was a dedicated leader of social work and civil rights causes and was a popular speaker. He initiated and led the Little Rock School of Social Work and was an outspoken supporter of integration.

It was announced that Fort Chaffee would be a Cuban refugee resettlement center after the Cuban government allowed American boats to pick up refugees at the port of Mariel. Three weeks later, a number of refugees rioted at Fort Chaffee and burned two buildings. State troopers and tear gas were used to break up the crowd, and eighty-four Cubans were jailed. In two years, Fort Chaffee processed 25,390 Cuban refugees. 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.

The bodies of eight-year-old Michael Moore, Christopher Byers, and Steve Branch were discovered submerged in a drainage ditch a few blocks from their homes. Their hands and feet had been bound, their skulls had been bludgeoned, and they had been sexually mutilated. Police arrested Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley for what have become known as the Robin Hood Hills Murders; however, continuing controversies over the case against the “West Memphis Three,” as the defendants have become known, have kept the murders and the men imprisoned for them in the national spotlight.

Elias Camp Morris, noted pastor of Centennial Baptist Church in Helena (Phillips County), was born near Springplace, Georgia. In 1894, he became president of the National Baptist Convention (NBC), the largest denomination of black Christians in the United States. Recognized by white Arkansans and the nation as a leader of the black community, he often served as a liaison between black and white communities on both the state and national level.

Dr. George B. Peters brazenly entered the headquarters of noted Mexican War veteran and Indian fighter Earl Van Dorn in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and shot him, claiming that he “violated the sanctity of his home,” meaning that Peters believed Van Dorn had had an affair with his wife. While rumors had circulated that Van Dorn had engaged in such activities in the past, his friends denied the claims. As a Confederate general, Van Dorn had been defeated at the Battle of Pea Ridge and at Corinth, Mississippi. Following the defeat at Pea Ridge, he stripped Arkansas of badly needed Confederate troops, leaving the state nearly destitute of defenders. Van Dorn is buried in his hometown of Port Gibson, Mississippi.

The short major league baseball career of Leroy Reams, who was born in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), began and ended when he struck out for the Philadelphia Phillies. He was traded to the Detroit Tigers before the 1970 season but never again left the minor leagues. Another short career was that of Otis Davis, born in Charleston (Franklin County). He started and ended his major league baseball career on April 22, 1946, when, batting for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Davis (known as “Scat”) was put in as a pinch runner. He never appeared again in the major leagues.

The Arkansas Federation of Women’s Clubs voted at the annual convention to change its official name to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs of Arkansas. Among its many accomplishments, the GFWC has established libraries across Arkansas and worked for the preservation of the Old State House in Little Rock (Pulaski County).

Ernie Deane died in Fayetteville (Washington County). Deane—journalist, teacher, historian, and folklorist—was best known for his newspaper columns “The Arkansas Traveler” and “Ozarks Country.” He taught journalism at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville and was a proponent of restoring Old Main to its historical character at the UA campus. The Ernie Deane Memorial Scholarship, established after Deane’s death, is awarded each year at J-Day to a UA journalism student, and the Ernie Deane Award is presented annually for the journalist or writer whose work “best exemplifies the spirit, style, and courage of Ernie Deane.”

Sam Houston—traveling in disguise on the steam packet Red Rover, by flatboat, and by steamship into Arkansas Territory—arrived in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on his way to live “in the wigwam of his adopted father,” John Jolly, chief of the Cherokee in Arkansas Territory. Houston had resigned his office as governor of Tennessee following the collapse of his marriage to eighteen-year-old Eliza Allen under mysterious circumstances. From May 1829 until November 1832, Houston lived in Arkansas Territory among the Cherokee.

The Skirmish at Maysville took place. A brief and indecisive engagement on the western edge of Arkansas, this skirmish was part of the war in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) that spilled into the state. Pitting Union Cherokee troops against Confederate-allied Cherokee, this skirmish is typical of the actions fought in the area at this point of the war.

John Parks Almand was born in Lithonia, Georgia. Almand worked as an architect in Arkansas for fifty years, beginning in 1912. Ten of his commissions have been recognized for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, including Central High School, First Church of Christ Scientist, and First Presbyterian Church, all in Little Rock (Pulaski County). First United Methodist Church in Fordyce (Dallas County) is also included, as well as Couchwood, the country home of Arkansas Power & Light founder Harvey Couch, and the Medical Arts Building, both in Hot Springs (Garland County).

The town of Delaplaine (Greene County) was incorporated. Delaplaine was formed by the railroad and the lumber industry, but agriculture, hunting, and fishing are the mainstays of the town’s economy in the twenty-first century. Delaplaine was a childhood home of Jimmie Lou Fisher, who served twenty-two years as state treasurer of Arkansas, being one of the first women elected to a statewide office in Arkansas. In 2002, she ran for governor but was defeated in a close election by incumbent Mike Huckabee.

Ash Flat (Sharp County) was incorporated. A group of residents, led by postmaster James McCord, chose the name Ash Flat because of a nearby grove of ash trees. In addition to its important contributions to Arkansas agriculture, Ash Flat also produced a noted educator and a renowned athlete. Born in 1906 in Ash Flat, David W. Mullins served as president of the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) from 1960 to 1974. Another Ash Flat native made important contributions to major league baseball. Left-handed pitcher Charles Elwin “Preacher” Roe, born in 1915, won 127 games with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Brooklyn Dodgers, and St. Louis Cardinals between the years 1938 and 1953.

After moderate Little Rock School Board members had walked out of a meeting in protest, segregationist board members held a rump session to fire forty-four teachers whom they believed supported integration. The dismissal touched a nerve among many in Little Rock’s business and civic community, most of whom had been reluctant to speak out during the Central High crisis in 1957. The reaction led to the meeting of a group of roughly 180 Little Rock residents to organize a recall effort aimed at ousting segregationists from the school board. STOP (Stop This Outrageous Purge) emerged from this meeting. Many members were the husbands of members of the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC), which had opposed Governor Orval Faubus’s decision to close Little Rock schools for the 1958–59 school year.

Henry Yuzuru Sugimoto—a noted artist whose paintings chronicled the immigrant experience, including the time he and his family spent in internment camps in southern Arkansas during World War II—died, after having lived the last twenty years of his life in Harlem, New York, working as an artist and fabric designer. He continued to paint until his death. His works are included in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, California. One of his most famous works is When Can We Go Home?, which portrays a Japanese mother and daughter surrounded by scenes of the relocation camp.

A so-called “Super Derecho” nicked northern Arkansas. It is one of the more unusual weather events ever recorded, producing an intense mesoscale vortex just across the Missouri border, with a rare hurricane-like eye structure. All told, this storm traveled 1,000 miles from its start as a collection of rain showers in Colorado. A derecho (pronounced deh-REY-cho) is an event that consists of winds that create a swath of damage that extends for more than 240 miles, has minimal wind gusts of at least fifty-eight miles per hour (mph) for most of this swath, and includes multiple hurricane-force (seventy-five mph or greater) gusts.

General Brehon Somervell was born in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Somervell was a major factor in the success of American military forces during World War II. He oversaw the construction of troop-training facilities and the supply of all American military forces. As construction division chief of the Army Quartermaster Corps, he was a major influence in the planning and construction of the Pentagon.

Pickens W. Black Sr. died in Newport (Jackson County) after several months of illness. Born in Alabama, Black moved to Arkansas as a teenager and became one of the most remarkable African-American agriculturalists in northeast Arkansas in the post–Civil War years. Although little has been written about his life, he is rightly entitled to appear in the annals of Arkansas history as an entrepreneur, community developer, philanthropist, and advocate for the education of black children in Jackson County. His land holdings at the time of his death included nearly 9,000 acres in and around Blackville. He is buried at Odd Fellows Cemetery in Auvergne (Jackson County).

The first of the 19,048 refugees who had escaped from Mariel, Cuba, seeking political asylum were transported from southern Florida to Fort Chaffee, at Barling near Fort Smith (Sebastian County). An estimated 25,390 had been housed there by the time the last few left in February 1982. Although only a small percentage of the thousands who were screened were found to have criminal records, rumors that the Cuban government had forced thousands of criminals and insane persons onto the boats in Mariel harbor may explain the negative reaction of many Arkansans to the presence of the refugees in northwest Arkansas. The situation is believed to have influenced Governor Bill Clinton’s defeat in his campaign for reelection against Frank White in 1980.

Tyson Foods of Springdale (Washington County) became the world’s largest poultry producer when it finished the acquisition of all the capital stock of Lane Processing, Inc., of Grannis (Polk County). The acquisition increased Tyson’s employment from about 20,300 to about 24,000. Although one of the Arkansas’s major economic success stories, the poultry industry faced several challenges by the end of the 1990s, particularly with regard to labor disputes in its processing plants and environmental concerns stemming from the problem of poultry-waste runoff. However, by the early twenty-first century, poultry production had become an essential component of Arkansas’s economy, and Tyson Foods—with plants and products in more than eighty countries—had annual revenues exceeding two billion dollars.

The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek, the third of the Boggy Creek films—which were loosely based on the legendary Fouke Monster of southwest Arkansas—was featured on the cult favorite show Mystery Science Theatre 3000, which presented heavily edited versions of B movies accompanied by humorous commentary lampooning the films. In Beast, writer, director, and star Charles Pierce of Texarkana (Miller County) plays University of Arkansas (UA) professor Brian C. “Doc” Lockhart, who, along with his students, searches for the creature that still haunts Boggy Creek. Beast features several recognizable shots of UA, including footage from a Razorbacks game.