January 12, 1870

Frank Barbour Coffin was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Coffin, an African-American pharmacist, moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County) in his early twenties and established one of Little Rock’s earliest drug stores that served the black community. He was also one of the country’s unnoted black poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, barely remembered today for his two volumes of poetry and other works printed in various publications.