June 10, 1936

The celebrations for the Arkansas Centennial began. President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Arkansas, including stops in Hot Springs (Garland County) and Malvern (Hot Spring County), and made a twenty-five-minute speech before 30,000 spectators at Fair Park in Little Rock (Pulaski County) to mark the occasion. Large crowds met the president everywhere he went until he departed for Texas to participate in celebrations honoring that state’s 100th anniversary of independence from Mexico. On June 15, Arkansas’s actual birthday, the U.S. government issued a postage stamp commemorating Arkansas statehood.