Entries - Time Period: Early Twentieth Century (1901 - 1940) - Starting with A

The Arkansas Geological Survey (AGS), formerly the Arkansas Geological Commission (AGC), is a division of the Arkansas Department of Energy and Environment (ADEE) charged with the investigation of the geology, geologic processes, and geologic resources of the state. It is further charged to encourage the effective management and utilization of the various mineral, fossil-fuel, and water resources with proper consideration of the potential environmental impacts of that activity. The Geological Survey of Arkansas was first established in 1857 with engagement of David Dale Owen as state geologist. He was funded for three years and was only able to publish part of his findings. Owen ultimately published another report in 1860 just a few days before he died. His training in geology …

Stretching from the Missouri border in the north to McGehee (Desha County), Arkansas Highway 1 spans almost 160 miles in the eastern part of the state. Part of the original state highway system, the roadway continues to be an important route in the Delta. The highway originated from a number of local roads constructed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A 1916 state road map includes several sections of the future highway, but most of the route does not yet appear. With the establishment of the state highway system in 1923, much of the route appeared on the official map. Improvements to the road over the decades brought Arkansas Highway 1 to modern standards while continuing to follow much …

The Arkansas Highway 57 Bridge crosses railroad tracks in Stephens (Ouachita County). Constructed in 1928, the bridge is a Warren pony truss with a pedestrian walkway located on the outside of the superstructure. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 28, 2005. Once used for vehicular traffic, it later became a pedestrian bridge. Stephens was founded as a stop on the St. Louis, Arkansas and Texas Railway. The St. Louis Southwestern Railway, also known as the Cotton Belt, took control of the line after 1882. With a 160-acre plot to construct a settlement, the owners of the rail line convinced several business owners in nearby Richland (Ouachita County) to move to the new settlement in …

Arkansas Holiness College (AHC), founded in 1904, was the focus for a body of Wesleyan holiness believers who congregated for nearly three decades in Vilonia (Faulkner County). The preaching of Methodist evangelists Beverly Carradine and H. C. Morrison at camp meetings held at Beebe (White County) in the 1890s spurred a holiness association in Vilonia composed of Methodists and Free Methodists. Members of the association formed a grammar school that opened in 1900 under the direction of Fannie Suddarth, a teacher (and later minister) from Kentucky. The school added grades and academic levels, including a Bible department in 1905, when the Reverend C. L. Hawkins came to head the school. The name Arkansas Holiness College was adopted at this time. …

The purpose of the Arkansas Insurance Department (AID) is to protect the public interest by the equitable enforcement of the state’s laws and regulations affecting the insurance industry. In addition, the AID seeks to deter and prosecute fraud. The work of the AID was formerly placed by law in the office of the Auditor of the State. The “Insurance Bureau” (as it was originally known) was established in the auditor’s office by Act 106 of 1873, the auditor being charged by the same act (approved on April 25, 1873) with the execution of the laws of the state relating to insurance. Due to the greatly increased volume of work required of the Insurance Bureau, the Arkansas General Assembly of 1917, …

The Arkansas Intercollegiate Conference (AIC) was an athletic confederation of Arkansas colleges and universities that was formed in 1928 as the Arkansas Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. The AIC was affiliated with the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), which was headquartered at Kansas City, Missouri. Most of the state’s four-year colleges and universities were members of the AIC at one time or another during its existence, with what are now Arkansas State University (ASU) in Jonesboro (Craighead County) and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) among the original members. The league disbanded in the spring of 1995. During most of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the AIC consisted of five state schools and five private schools. The state schools …

The Arkansas Negro Democratic Association (ANDA) was founded in 1928 by Little Rock (Pulaski County) physician John Marshall Robinson, who served as president until 1952, and a number of other prominent black professionals. Between 1928 and 1952, ANDA was the leading voice of black Arkansas Democrats in the state. Although ANDA tackled a number of issues concerned with racial discrimination, its principal focus was on winning the right for black citizens to participate in the activities of the Arkansas Democratic Party, especially its primary elections. In Arkansas, the payment of a one-dollar poll tax qualified a person to vote, irrespective of race. But exclusion from state Democratic Party primary elections significantly disfranchised black voters since that party dominated state politics. …

The Arkansas Pioneer Branch of the National League of American Pen Women (NLAPW) was created to bring together professional women artists, writers, and composers for the protection and sharing of their mutual interests. The Arkansas Branch was the ninth branch to join the National League. The Arkansas Branch, as it was first called, was founded by Bernie Babcock in 1920 with seven charter members. The group’s mission has been identical to that of the National League, which was founded in 1897 in Washington DC, with the purpose of encouraging creative work in art, letters, and music and promoting professional growth of members. The charter of the Arkansas Branch was presented at the first national NLAPW meeting in 1921. Babcock was …

The Arkansas Power and Light Company (AP&L) was the primary electrical utility company for much of Arkansas from 1913 to 1989. It was the predecessor to Entergy Corporation, the electrical company now serving much of the state in the twenty-first century. The company was founded in 1913 as the Arkansas Power Company by Harvey Crowley Couch, a native of Columbia County and a successful railroad and telephone utility entrepreneur. In 1914, Couch bought the power plants at Arkadelphia (Clark County) and Malvern (Hot Spring County) and then built a twenty-two-mile electrical transmission line running between them. The system had problems with electrical supply and ran exclusively at night, but it served as the only electrical transmission line in the state. …

“The Arkansas Race Riot” is a 1920 pamphlet that constitutes a critical source of information about the Elaine Massacre of 1919. Written by famed anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the pamphlet disputes the narrative offered by white political and economic elites in Phillips County—namely, that local African Americans had plotted to kill white residents in the area. Instead, Wells-Barnett recorded how Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers had formed a union, the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America (PFHUA), for purposes of securing better payment for their cotton crop and explained how the massacre was a direct response to their union activities. Ida B. Wells had been born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and, after both of her parents …

Founded in 1912 by executives of a dozen prominent Arkansas timber firms, the Arkansas Soft Pine Bureau (ASPB) spent decades promoting its members’ southern pine lumber. American Lumberman ad salesman Robert H. Brooks originally conceived of the ASPB, using his previous experience with these firms to convince them to try a one-year advertising campaign funded by an assessment of five cents per 1,000 board feet of lumber manufactured in their Arkansas mills. The first ASPB advertisements appeared in October 1912 and proved successful enough that, by the spring of 1913, the ASPB principals initiated a national campaign and coined the term “Arkansas Soft Pine”—a description patented in 1921 as a registered trademark. Brooks, a Kansan with previous experience in the …

The Arkansas State Archives (ASA), located in Little Rock (Pulaski County), is the official state archives of Arkansas and houses the state’s largest collection of documents, publications, photographs, and other material relating to Arkansas history. The Arkansas History Commission, as the institution was originally named, was established by the Arkansas General Assembly in 1905 as part of the burgeoning state archives movement that swept the South shortly after 1900. It was created largely through the efforts of John Hugh Reynolds, a history professor at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County). “The Commission exists,” Dallas T. Herndon, the first executive secretary and director wrote in 1911, the year the legislature finally appropriated funding for the commission, “to gather …

The Arkansas Capitol building is the seat of the state’s government, housing its legislature as well as the staffs of six out of Arkansas’s seven constitutional officers. The monumental neo-classical structure gave rise to political controversy during its construction but has generally been praised since its completion in 1915. The current building is the second capitol built in Little Rock (Pulaski County). It replaced the State House (today’s Old State House Museum) erected in the 1830s between Markham Street and the banks of the Arkansas River in downtown Little Rock. During the 1890s, calls were raised for a new capitol, but sentiment and financial considerations, coupled with the lack of a suitable site, effectively blocked the project. By 1899, the …

In observance of the centennial anniversary of the creation of the Arkansas Territory, Governor Charles Hillman Brough endorsed a statewide commemoration planning effort in June 1919. The commemoration plans involved all seventy-five Arkansas counties, an extensive network of committees, hundreds of planners and fundraisers, and elaborate plans for the main centennial observance, scheduled to be held in Little Rock (Pulaski County) in November 1919. The observance failed to materialize, however, against a backdrop of concerns over a Spanish influenza recurrence and fundraising shortfalls. The idea for a Territorial Centennial originated with Harvey C. Couch, president of Arkansas Power and Light Company (AP&L), who suggested a statewide celebration held in conjunction with the centennial of the Arkansas Gazette. In March 1919, …

The Arkansas Traveller was a weekly Ku Klux Klan (KKK) newspaper published in El Dorado (Union County) and Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1923 and 1924. It was one of many Klan newspapers of the 1920s, joining such national newspapers as the Searchlight, Imperial Night-Hawk, Klan Kourier, and Fiery Cross. Many states and some cities had Klan newspapers similar to the Arkansas Traveller. The newspaper reported on activities of local Klan chapters and pushed the national Klan agenda against immigration, Catholicism, immorality, and racial equality. The newspaper was first published around April 1923 in El Dorado by Elmer C. Croom and James D. Baynham, both of whom held jobs with the El Dorado Daily Tribune. Croom worked as the general …

The Arkansas Tuberculosis Sanatorium (also called simply the State Sanatorium) was established in 1909 about three miles south of Booneville (Logan County). Once fully established, the sanatorium was a hospital for the treatment of white Arkansans with tuberculosis. By the time the facility was closed in 1973, it treated over 70,000 patients, and in time, its main hospital, the Nyberg Building, became known worldwide for its tuberculosis treatment. With the passage of Act 378 of the Arkansas General Assembly, a board of trustees was created to oversee the search for land to build a sanatorium. This was a very vital start to create a facility that would, in fact, quarantine a highly pathogenic disease. Tuberculosis, which caused scarring of the …

Beginning in 1896, the Kansas City, Pittsburg and Gulf Railroad (later the Kansas City Southern) arrived in Heavener, Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Three years later, the Arkansas Western Railroad Company was incorporated in Arkansas in order to build a thirty-two-mile extension into Arkansas from Heavener to Waldron (Scott County). On October 1, 1901, an engine arrived in Waldron pulling fourteen carloads of steel rails that would finish the track. In 1904, the Kansas City Southern (KCS) organized the Arkansas Western Railway Company, and the Arkansas Western Railroad became a KCS subsidiary. Advertisements soon began running in local newspapers with a “Through Train” schedule. Beginning on July 24, 1904, passengers were able to board a train in Fort Smith (Sebastian County) …

The Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) served as a cultural anchor for Arkansas during the years of the Great Depression by providing work for unemployed and underemployed writers, who observed, recorded, and described the contemporary cultural conditions in their work. These texts serve to this day as the most complete and comprehensive documentation of Arkansas history and culture available from the viewpoint of Arkansans. The FWP was initiated in July 1935 as a component of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) program. The intention of the FWP was to provide employment to out-of-work writers affected by the Depression. The FWP writers were engaged in writing local histories, travelers’ guides, and cultural chronicles, particularly those relating to long-oppressed American groups …

The Arkansas State League/Arkansas-Missouri League was a professional baseball, Class D minor league that operated from 1934 until 1940. The league was one of only three Depression-era leagues to exist in the state, the others being the Northeast Arkansas League and the Cotton States League. The Arkansas State League began on May 8, 1934. It paralleled a rapid growth in professional baseball minor leagues around the country and was a by-product of the farm system created by St. Louis Cardinals vice president, Branch Rickey, wherein the Cardinals organization sponsored and managed teams and players in order to develop players for the St. Louis major league team. The league began play with teams in Fayetteville (Washington County), Siloam Springs (Benton County), …

The Arkansaw Bear: A Tale of Fanciful Adventure is a children’s story written by Albert Bigelow Paine in 1898. Paine called upon southern folktale and storytelling tradition and used lyrics of “The Arkansas Traveler” as inspiration for his story. Albert Paine (July 10, 1861–April 9, 1937) was a highly respected American author and noted biographer of Mark Twain. Besides fiction, Paine wrote humor and poetry, and he served as a member of the Pulitzer Prize committee. Paine spent the majority of his adult life living and writing in Europe, where he was awarded the title of Chevalier in the Legion d’Honneur by the French government for his biographies of Joan of Arc. Paine told the story in The Arkansaw Bear: …

Arlberg is a remote and sparsely populated community in Red River Township of Stone County on the west side of the middle fork of the Little Red River near the Van Buren County line. Arlberg is located two miles off Arkansas 110 in southwestern Stone County at the bottom of Angora Mountain. The Arlberg Arch, also known as Rainbow Rock, is a prominent natural monument in the area, located near the settlement on private property with limited access. In the twenty-first century, the area is mainly of historic interest and a place for hunting, fishing, and swimming. In the region where Arlberg was later built, Civil War guerrilla and outlaw Bill Dark terrorized the hill people until early 1863, when …

In 1930, Texas suffragist and civil rights activist Jessie Daniel Ames and a group of white women in the South founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL). The ASWPL’s primary objective was to use white women’s moral and social leverage to educate and persuade southern whites to end the practice of lynching in rural communities. Ames—who was also a member of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC), which was founded in 1919, and its Director of Women’s Work—sought to create a unique, independent network of organizations for middle-class white Christian women. ASWPL founders were not interested in creating another typical women’s organization, and they rejected federal intervention to end lynching as an affront to states’ …

W. Emmett Atkinson was a farmer and teacher working in Arkansas in the later part of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. An active Democrat and local office holder, he became embroiled in controversy concerning his support for the American effort in World War I. Willie Emmett Atkinson was born on February 4, 1874, to Robert Atkinson and Eliza Ramsey Gordon Atkinson on the family’s farm near McNeil (Columbia County). He grew up in the Harrison Township of Columbia County; his father had been heavily involved with the development of the township. Atkinson taught school in Columbia, Lafayette, and Nevada counties from 1897 to 1916. Atkinson was often the only teacher in a school that might enroll …

On July 30, 1917, an African-American man named Andrew Avery was lynched for allegedly attacking a levee contractor named Will Woods (also referred to as W. J. Woods and William Wood) several days earlier. Although a headline in the Arkansas Gazette indicates that Avery was lynched in Garland City (Miller County), information in the article itself seems to indicate that Avery was captured by Deputy Sheriff Walter Oden at Sheppard (in neighboring Hempstead County) and a mob intercepted them on their way to the Hempstead County jail. Another article in the Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, however, omits any mention of Sheppard or Hempstead County and reports that Oden was taking Avery to the jail in Texarkana (Miller County) when he …