The C. E. Thompson General Store and House is located in Arkadelphia (Clark County). Serving as both a store and home into the mid-twentieth century and later renovated to be used as a restaurant, the structure was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 4, 2001. Located at the intersection of State Highways 8 and 26, the building was constructed in 1936 by the Thompson family. The Craftsman-style building was designed to serve as both a home and a store. The house sits on a continuous brick foundation but was constructed on brick piers. Covered in weatherboard, the building is topped with a composition shingled roof. Most of the windows are double hung three over one. The …
Caddo River Lumber Company was one of the largest lumber companies operating in the Ouachita Mountains during the first half of the twentieth century. During the Depression, it may have been the largest manufacturing employer in the state. However, like many other lumber companies of the era, it succumbed to a shortsighted policy of non-sustainable practices. The Caddo River Lumber Company was organized in 1906 by Thomas Whitaker Rosborough, M. R. Smith, W. E. Cooper, and Lee Wilson of Kansas City, Missouri, with Smith as president and Rosborough as vice president, though the latter managed the operations of the company. Rosborough had previously operated sawmills and a planing mill in Arkansas and Louisiana and had done some work for Ozan …
Caddo Valley Academy (CVA) was founded in Womble (Montgomery County) in 1921. Though the private school was open for a relatively short amount of time, it had a lasting impact on the residents of Womble, which was later known as Norman. Through a blended curriculum of standard academics and biblical teachings, CVA provided a strong educational foundation for its students. Dr. John Tilman Barr Jr. established CVA. Barr was born in 1886 and devoted much of his life to working with children. Though he was frequently ill, Barr originally aspired to be a lawyer and politician. However, he came to believe that God had instructed him to become a minister and so devoted his life to the Presbyterian Church. Barr’s …
Early on the morning of November 8, 1903, a mob lynched a white man named Zallie C. Cadle in Brinkley (Monroe County) for the alleged murder of a night marshal named J. C. Cox. The Forrest City Times reported that Cox had been a farmer outside Forrest City (St. Francis County) and was “highly esteemed.” According to marriage and burial records, Zallie Cadle was born in 1873 and married Nancy Simmons in Cash (Craighead County) in 1896. Although the earliest information about the lynching appeared in both the Arkansas Democrat and the Arkansas Gazette on November 10, a later article in the Forrest City Times provides more information. According to this report, Cadle was a lumberman at Hutchinson’s Mill, and …
Creed Caldwell was a prominent attorney, as well as an influential figure in Arkansas politics in the first decades of the twentieth century. He served in the Arkansas Senate for almost two decades after building a prosperous and well-respected law practice beginning in the later part of the nineteenth century. Creed Caldwell was born on October 4, 1864, in the family home near Double Wells, about ten miles west of Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). He was born to Matthew Caldwell and his second wife, Harriett Stribling Caldwell. As Creed Caldwell was born near the end of the Civil War, which had decimated the Caldwell family’s property holdings, he did not have the same educational opportunities his older siblings had had. …
The Calhoun County Courthouse is a 1909 building composed of a rectangular central wing flanked on all sides by a variety of projections. The courthouse includes arched double-hung windows, and arched doorways form the exterior of the first floor. The second floor houses paired, rectangular windows. While devoid of many intricacies, the building demonstrates common Classical and Colonial Revival details. On December 12, 1976, the courthouse was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Calhoun County Courthouse is at 309 W. Main St. in Hampton (Calhoun County), 200 feet north of the Hampton Cemetery and slightly west of the Hampton Masonic Lodge Building, both of which are also listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Constructed in …
The Calico Rock Historic District covers the first block of Calico Rock (Izard County) up from the White River plus the Riverview Hotel behind Main Street. These buildings, erected from 1903 to 1924, represent early twentieth-century architectural styles. The district is typical of downtown districts that emerged along railroad lines, though Calico Rock stands out for having been built on a hillside. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 19, 1985. In 1901, Calico Rock was a steamboat landing with few businesses. That year, the Iron Mountain Railway began laying tracks for the White River Line along the north river bank from Batesville (Independence County) to Cotter (Baxter County). Freight and passenger service to Calico Rock …
The Calico Rock Home Economics Building, located on Second Street in Calico Rock (Izard County), was built in 1940–1941 with assistance from the National Youth Administration (NYA), a Depression-era federal relief agency. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 10, 1992. Students in the White River town of Calico Rock were being served by a two-story school building erected in 1921 and a later gymnasium when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal created opportunities for an additional building. The school district turned to the NYA, which provided employment opportunities for young people, to build a home economics building on the school campus. Though the NYA approved the project around 1938, construction was delayed. The Calico …
aka: Calico Rock Music Hall
The Calico Rock Methodist Episcopal Church, located in Calico Rock (Izard County), was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007, the same year it was reopened as the Calico Rock Music Hall. The building’s Craftsman style and tan and dark red bricks are unusual in the Ozark Mountains. In the sanctuary, the original banked pews, pine floors, triple tray pressed-tin ceiling, and stained glass windows are still in place, as well as the 500-pound bell in the tower. Each of the five classrooms on the first floor has several six-foot-long double-hung windows. When the St. Louis and Iron Mountain Railroad began laying tracks along the banks of the White River in 1903, Calico Rock became a boom …
Ida Hayman Callery was a teacher, suffragist, feminist, and socialist organizer in Arkansas prior to World War I. She traveled extensively as an organizer for the Socialist Party in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Her unwillingness to acknowledge the equality of African Americans, however, served to limit her influence, as she consciously excluded them from her efforts. Ida Hayman was born on October 23, 1886, on a farm near Caldwell in Sumner County, Kansas, the eldest of eight children of William D. Hayman, who was a farmer and businessman, and Emma Belle Burnett Hayman, a homemaker. Hayman worked on the family farm and later worked on behalf of tenant farmers and coal miners. After her father lost money in the declining …
Founded in 1926, Camden Art Tile and Pottery Company was the third and last producer of Art Pottery in Arkansas. By the end of its first year, its name had changed to Camark to include both the city of Camden (Ouachita County) and the state of Arkansas. Camark Pottery eventually became one of Camden’s best-known industries and was known nationwide. Samuel Jacob “Jack” Carnes, a native of Zanesville, Ohio, and an engineer with knowledge of the pottery business, wished to access the regional pottery market, so he created the company with several Ohio associates, including businessmen and artists. They held a competition among twenty-five cities for its placement. Camden won the appointment in 1926. At this time, Camden was booming. …
The Camden Confederate Monument is a commemorative sculpture erected in 1915 on the grounds of the Ouachita County Courthouse in Camden (Ouachita County) through the efforts of the Hugh McCollum Camp 778 of the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), aided by the Hiram L. Grinstead Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), to honor women who had supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. The Camden Confederate Monument is one of two Arkansas memorials that honor the women who supported the Confederate cause, and as with the Monument to Confederate Women on the Arkansas State Capitol grounds, it was raised through the efforts of the United Confederate Veterans. Sufficient money was raised by the McCollum Camp, with help from …
Camp Halsey was a Soil Conservation Service camp established in 1934 a few miles to the east of Greenbrier in the northeastern corner of Faulkner County. It later became a forestry camp before closing in 1939. In the twenty-first century, the site is archaeological site 3FA313. The location is about one mile east of Woolly Hollow State Park. The small community of Centerville (Faulkner County) is located about one mile to the west of the camp location. In response to expansive droughts in the early twentieth century, the U.S. government established “demonstration projects” tied to programs of soil conservation within watersheds. The Cadron Creek Demonstration Project was one of the first of these in Arkansas, although it was not affiliated …
Camp Joyzelle was a summer camp for girls that operated for nearly three decades at Monte Ne (Benton County). Summer camps emerged in the late 1800s as a way to provide urban youngsters with wholesome, outdoor activities during the long summer vacation. Summer camping for girls became popular after World War I. Some camps were run by organizations such as the Girl Scouts, while others were similar to private schools and served mostly well-to-do families. Camp Joyzelle was a typical example of the latter. The camp was founded by Iris Armstrong, who at the time had a private dramatic academy in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Armstrong’s goal was to start a camp at which girls could be instructed in drama …