Time Period: Early Twentieth Century (1901 - 1940)

Hollywood Cemetery—Confederate Section

aka: Hollywood Cemetery Confederate Section
The Confederate Section of Hollywood Cemetery in Hot Springs (Garland County) is a 60′ x 54′ cemetery plot surrounded by a low concrete wall with ornamental concrete posts at all four corners and an opening on the western side inscribed “Confederate Veterans.” The plot contains thirty-four marked burials, a fieldstone monument, and four concrete benches. David Stone Ryan, who served as a lieutenant in a North Carolina unit during the Civil War and later made a home in Hot Springs, purchased the Confederate Section in Hollywood Cemetery in 1900, on behalf of the Albert Pike Camp of the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), to ensure a final resting place for his fellow aging Confederates. The Albert Pike Camp was disbanded in …

Holt, Maud Spiller

Maud Spiller Holt was an avid traveler and painter who painted in every American state and throughout much of Europe. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) guide to 1930s Arkansas cited Holt as one of the state’s most accomplished women artists. Today, her paintings are on display at the Arkansas State Capitol, at Historic Arkansas Museum, and in various other public and private collections. Maud Spiller was born in Carbondale, Illinois, on November 1, 1866, the daughter of James W. Spiller and Sarah Patrick Spiller. On December 22, 1886, Spiller married Winfield Scott Holt at Albion, Illinois, and moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County). Winfield Holt became one of the most progressive businessmen of Little Rock and served many years as …

Home Demonstration Clubs

Home demonstration clubs were an integral part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Cooperative Extension Service, which was established during the early twentieth century as an experiment in adult education, providing agricultural demonstration work for men and home demonstration work for women. The home demonstration work taught farm women improved methods for accomplishing their household responsibilities and encouraged them to better their families’ living conditions through home improvements and labor-saving devices. Beyond just the realm of the individual family, the clubs also became sources of education and charity in communities. On January 1, 1912, Emma Archer organized the first canning club work for girls in Mabelvale (Pulaski County). In 1916, Archer became Arkansas’s first state home demonstration agent. As such, she …

Home Ice Company

The Home Ice Company building, once located at 700 Cate Avenue in Jonesboro (Craighead County), was an early twentieth-century industrial structure that was associated with various industries. The building was first home to a wagon factory, then a peanut processing plant, then an ice cream manufacturing facility, and finally an ice plant. The businesses occupying the building over the years provided jobs and products for the local community and for communities abroad. In June 2017, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places; it was announced the next month that the building would be demolished. Around 1910, the Jonesboro Wagon Manufacturing Company, the only maker of farm wagons in Jonesboro, constructed a new two-story exterior brick structure, …

Home News (McCrory)

Walter Wilson Raney, an enterprising newspaper publisher, is credited with helping shape McCrory (Woodruff County) into a business center. Raney founded the Home News in McCrory in 1915, establishing the News as a Democratic paper published on Fridays. Raney printed on the masthead that the paper was “edited in the interest of McCrory and Woodruff County” and wrote in the first issue that citizens had solicited him to “give us a home paper.” In 1918, for printing the News, Raney installed the first and only typesetting machine in the county. Raney had begun his newspaper career in the printing office of the Woodruff County News (1901–1910), run by Gustave W. Kramer. After working for the Woodruff County News for two …

Hoo-Hoo Monument

The Hoo-Hoo Monument, built in 1909 and located in the southeastern corner of the Missouri Pacific Railroad Depot parking lot at North 1st and Main streets in Gurdon (Clark County), is a granite and bronze monument with Egyptian Revival detail, designed by artist George J. Zolnay. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 2, 1999. The International Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo, a fraternal group of lumbermen, was founded in 1892 in Gurdon in the Hotel Hall by Bolling Arthur Johnson and five other men. According to tradition, Johnson—a lumber trade journalist—had for some time seen a need to link together, or “concatenate,” the workers of the timber industry. In 1891, there were many local and …

Hookworm Eradication

Hookworm disease was a significant public health issue in Arkansas until the movement to eradicate hookworms in the early twentieth century. With official estimates claiming that up to twenty percent of the entire population of the state suffered from hookworm infestation, this parasite was sufficiently widespread to affect the economy as well as the health of Arkansas. Its virtual eradication was the result of a public health and education campaign on the part of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission between 1910 and 1914. The hookworm is an intestinal parasite that grows and reproduces in the intestines of its hosts. When infected people deposit feces containing hookworm eggs in warm, moist, shaded soil, the eggs hatch and develop into larvae. Within five …

Hope Girl Scout Little House

The Hope Girl Scout Little House, located near Jones Street in Fair Park in Hope (Hempstead County), is a one-and-a-half-story Rustic-style log building constructed between 1938 and 1939 with assistance from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a Depression-era federal relief program. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 27, 2015. The Girl Scout Little House movement had its origins in the 1923 Better Homes Demonstration Week when architect Donn Barber designed a house “for the American family of average size and moderate income” behind the White House in Washington DC for the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the Better Homes of America organization. After the June 1923 celebration, Lou Henry Hoover, wife of future …

Horace Estes House

The Horace Estes House is a Tudor Revival–style house constructed in Gurdon (Clark County) in 1934. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 21, 1993. The structure is unique in Gurdon, as it is the only Tudor-style structure in a town where most of the homes from the same period are devoid of any decoration and are constructed solely of locally sourced materials. Gurdon was a company town built around the timber industry and associated railroad industries, and the majority of structures in the community were constructed using local lumber. While a brick plant operated in Gurdon, homes constructed from brick in this period were uncommon, although not unheard of. The house is a wood-framed, …

Horace Mann School Historic District

The Horace Mann School Historic District at Norfork (Baxter County) is a complex of four buildings constructed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and National Youth Administration (NYA) during the Great Depression. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 29, 2007. The first school at Norfork was established in 1908, two years before the town was incorporated, but by the 1930s, the wood-frame school was no longer adequate for the area’s educational needs. The community turned to the WPA, one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies, for assistance. Construction of the Main School Building started in 1936 under the direction of WPA supervisor Tom Collier, with the federal agency supplying $18,564 and the community …

Horton, Zilphia Mae Johnson

Zilphia Mae Johnson Horton was an influential educator, folklorist, musician, and social justice activist who collected, adapted, performed, and promoted the use of folksongs and hymns in the labor and civil rights movements, notably “We Shall Not Be Moved” and “We Shall Overcome.” These two, respectively, became labor and civil rights movement anthems. She served as the first cultural director of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee—the precursor of today’s Highlander Research and Education Center, founded by her husband Myles Horton—until her untimely death in 1956. Zilphia Johnson was born in Paris (Logan County) on April 14, 1910, the second child of Robert Guy Johnson, a coal mine superintendent, and Ora Ermon Howard Johnson, a schoolteacher. She was the eldest of …

Hospital Unit T

When the United States entered World War I on April 6, 1917, the need for trained medical personnel was great, and medical units of doctors, nurses, and enlisted men were recruited heavily. The American Red Cross asked for units to be formed from hospitals and medical schools across the United States to go to France and England. Arkansas’s contribution was Hospital Unit T, Medical Department, National Army (called Hospital Unit T for short). Dr. William A. Snodgrass, a Little Rock (Pulaski County) physician with the University of Arkansas Medical School (now the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences) was authorized to form a unit for military service. His authorization was announced in the Arkansas Gazette on July 1, 1917. This …

Hot Spring County Courthouse

The Hot Spring County Courthouse, located on 210 Locust Street in downtown Malvern (Hot Spring County), is a three-and-a-half-story building made of brick and steel. The Arkansas Historic Preservation Program declared it architecturally and historically significant for its Art Deco design and status as a former project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program. The National Park Service added it to the National Register of Historic Places on November 7, 1996. After the Cairo and Fulton Railroad established Malvern as a stop along its railway in 1873, the city felt the economic benefits of being connected to other parts of the country. At that time, the adjoining town of Rockport (Hot Spring County) stood as the county …

Hot Springs Central Avenue Historic District

The Hot Springs Central Avenue Historic District extends from 205 Park Avenue to 702 Central Avenue in Hot Springs (Garland County). It contains some of the state’s finest historic buildings built between 1886 and 1930. The district was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 25, 1985. The buildings reflect the growth of Hot Springs as one of the nation’s premier resort destinations in the late 1800s through the mid-1900s. The Central Avenue area has traditionally been the main commercial district of Hot Springs. Fronting Bathhouse Row, the stores, hotels, offices, and restaurants located on Central Avenue served local residents as well as the visitors who drove the city’s booming tourist trade until the last half of …

Hot Springs Confederate Monument

The Hot Springs Confederate Monument is a commemorative sculpture erected in 1934 at Landmark Plaza by the Hot Springs Chapter No. 80 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) to commemorate men who had served in the Confederate army during the Civil War. The Hot Springs Chapter of the UDC, like its sister chapters around the state, sought to commemorate Confederate soldiers and veterans, and much of its early work focused on the Confederate Section at Hollywood Cemetery, which the chapter took over from the Albert Pike Camp of United Confederate Veterans (UCV) in 1906. That project was completed in 1919 when a granite monument inscribed “Our Confederate Dead” was placed in the southern end of the plot. The effort …