Time Period: Early Twentieth Century (1901 - 1940)

House at 712 North Mill Street

Sometime between 1900 and 1904, Tennessee-born Gustavus (Gus) Rugel; his wife, Effie; and their five children moved from Mesquite, Texas, to Springdale (Washington and Benton counties), where they purchased forty-eight acres of farmland along Mill Street on the north side of town. Rugel had been a hardware dealer in Texas; in Springdale, he made his living as a fruit grower. In May 1913, Gus and Effie Rugel subdivided part of their farm to create the Rugel Addition, ten residential lots fronting Mill Street. In May 1914, Leroy Davis and Fanny Mae Davis bought Lot 6 in the Rugel Addition for $350. Within two months, the Davises sold Lot 6 for $2,000, evidence of a major improvement to the property—a Craftsman-style …

Houser, Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte Houser was a prominent African American physician, owner of the Black Diamond Drug Store, and investor in Helena (Phillips County) from 1901 to 1920. He came to Helena from Charlotte, North Carolina, as the Arkansas Delta’s population and opportunities grew, but returned to the place of his birth following the Elaine Massacre. N. B. Houser was born near Gastonia, in Gaston County, North Carolina, on February 14, 1869. He was the son of William H. Houser, a well-to-do brick mason and contractor, and Fannie Houser, a housekeeper and mother. The youngest of six siblings, Houser attended public schools in Charlotte and worked as a farm hand on his father’s farm until the age of fourteen, when he began …

Housley v. State

On November 13, 1919, Virgil Housely was convicted of arson and sentenced to two years in an Arkansas prison for his alleged role in the March 29, 1919, attack on the African American settlement of Little Georgia (Garland County). Housley’s conviction was later overturned by the Arkansas Supreme Court. On the evening of March 29, 1919, six or seven men gathered to attack the African American residents of Little Georgia, possibly in hopes of seizing valuable farmland. They swept through the town, firing guns, setting fire to homes with torches, and throwing dynamite. After the incident, most Black families fled Little Georgia, and it was not until the end of May that authorities were able to identify and arrest six …

Howard County Courthouse

The Howard County Courthouse is located on 421 North Main Street. It stands at the gateway of downtown Nashville (Howard County), which encompasses the city’s commercial and government districts. The Arkansas Historic Preservation Program recognizes the two-story building as architecturally and historically significant, as it stands as a visible result of the New Deal policies of the 1930s. The National Park Service added it to the National Register of Historic Places on June 14, 1990. At the county’s creation in 1873, the Nineteenth Arkansas General Assembly made Center Point (Howard County) the county seat due to its convenient geographical location. Meanwhile, the economic hub centered on Nashville, with cotton, wool, and peaches driving economic output. After the Arkansas and Louisiana …

Hubert and Ionia Furr House

The Hubert and Ionia Furr House is located at 702 Desoto Avenue in Arkansas City (Desha County). Built in 1910 by local timber man Hubert Furr and wife, Ionia, the house was constructed in the Dutch Colonial Revival style. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2011, the home is also the only residence in Arkansas City that has face ornamental concrete block. Hubert Furr was born in Tennessee in 1875 and moved to Arkansas City in 1892. Furr was known as “the Hustling Real Estate and Timber Man of Desha County”; he seemed to be better versed in timber values than any other person in the county. Furr had become one of the most influential residents of Desha …

Huddleston, John Wesley

John Wesley Huddleston is best known as a struggling farmer who found two diamonds on the surface of his field near Murfreesboro (Pike County) in August 1906 and made himself and his state famous. Soon after the discovery, he was recognized as the first person outside South Africa to find diamonds at an original volcanic source. In the process, he also became the controversial subject of numerous folk tales. A native of Pike County, John Huddleston was born in 1862 to David Fielding Huddleston and America White Huddleston. He had seven siblings before his mother’s death in the early 1870s and gained three step-sisters after his father’s remarriage to Francis Carey. In 1886, Huddleston wed Sarah A. Keys, the mother …

Hughes Hall (Arkansas Tech University)

aka: Rock Armory
Hughes Hall, located at 514 West M Street on the Arkansas Tech University campus in Russellville (Pope County), is a two-story, U-shaped stone masonry building constructed with assistance from the WPA (the Works Progress Administration, renamed the Works Projects Administration in 1939), a Depression-era federal relief program. Constructed in 1940, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 18, 1992. The campus of Arkansas Polytechnic College (now Arkansas Tech University) comprised seventeen major buildings, including several dormitories that the U.S. Office of Education deemed “unfit for human habitation,” when Joseph W. Hull became the college’s eighth president in January 1932 and embarked on a major building campaign. After receiving assistance from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and …

Hughes Water Tower

The Hughes Water Tower is located on Church Street in Hughes (St. Francis County). The metal water tower was built by the Chicago Bridge and Iron Works for the Public Works Administration (PWA) in 1936. It is a good example of a 1930s water tower and the only surviving example of a PWA-built water tower in the county. Hughes was founded in 1913 as the Iron Mountain Railroad built its expensive “mud line” from West Memphis (Crittenden County) to Marianna (Lee County) through the swamps and scrub prairies of the Arkansas Delta. It was named for Robert Hughes, who donated land to the railroad. By the time the Great Depression struck, the small town of Hughes served the vast agricultural …

Human Dissection Monument

The first human dissection performed in Arkansas is commemorated by an obelisk located at the edge of MacArthur Park in Little Rock (Pulaski County). In 1927, the Arkansas Medical Society unveiled the marker, whose inscription states that the dissection was held on that spot in November 1874. To clarify: the monument honors the state’s first such legal event, and the unveiling took place on May 13, despite the marker being dated May 12. Following appeals by doctors, in April 1873 the Arkansas General Assembly passed Act 45 authorizing “dissection in certain cases for the advancement of science.” This paved the way for the establishment of a medical school, as the new law gave both doctors and medical students the right …

Humphreys, Thomas Hadden

Thomas Hadden Humphreys, son of a Confederate army officer, spent some thirty-nine years on the judicial bench, the last twenty-six as a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, and held elective political offices for forty-four years without ever having had an opponent. Governor Jeff Davis, the populist orator who later became a U.S. senator, appointed Humphreys, a Fayetteville (Washington County) lawyer, to a new chancery judgeship in the Eleventh District in 1903, and Governor George Washington Hays named him to a vacancy on the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1916 when Justice William F. Kirby was elected to the U.S. Senate. Humphreys’s father, John T. Humphreys, was a lawyer in Fort Smith (Sebastian County) who joined the First Arkansas Light Artillery …

Humphreys’ Dairy Farm

Humphreys’ Dairy Farm started in 1911 in Hot Springs (Garland County) with two cows and several acres. As the farm and family grew, so did the importance of the dairy farm to Hot Springs and surrounding towns. As an early adopter of homogenization and pasteurization, the dairy led in innovations that transformed the dairy industry. Humphreys’ Dairy Farm, which closed in the 1990s, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. Harris Humphreys founded Humphreys’ Dairy Farm in 1911. He was born in Arkadelphia (Clark County) in 1878 and attended Ouachita College (now Ouachita Baptist University). After moving to Hot Springs in 1909, he began buying land and clearing it for farming. The extant farmhouse was built …

Hunt, Frances Rowena Mathews Jones

Frances Hunt was a representative from Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) in the Forty-third, Forty-fourth, and Forty-fifth Arkansas General Assemblies, serving from 1922 to 1926. She was the first woman to serve in the Arkansas General Assembly.  Frances Rowena Mathews was born on June 6, 1874, in Des Arc (Prairie County) to Julia Ann Wair Mathews and Allen C. Mathews, a Confederate veteran and editor of the Des Arc Citizen. Her friends and family called her “Fannie Dear.” She was educated in the Des Arc schools and learned the printing trade in her father’s newspaper office.   Her father died in 1891, shortly after purchasing the Prairie County Democrat and founding the Des Arc Guidon. Her mother moved with her family to live on the plantation of her brother, Samuel T. Wair, in Redfield (Jefferson County). Wair was active in politics, representing Barraque Township on the Jefferson County Democratic Central Committee and serving as a delegate to the Democratic State Convention. Another …

Hunter, William (Lynching of)

On July 11, 1910, an African-American man named William Hunter (often referred to as Will) was lynched near Star City (Lincoln County) for allegedly entering the bedroom of Rosa Johnson (sometimes referred to as Roel, Rhoa, or Roca), the daughter of prominent local farmer Thomas W. Johnson. Both the alleged perpetrator and the alleged victim appear in public records. In 1880, there was a seven-month-old African-American child named Willie Hunter living in Lone Pine Township with his parents, laborers Louis and Susan Hunter. In 1900, William Hunter, nineteen years old, was still living in the township with his mother, Susan. In 1910, Hunter remained in Lone Pine Township, where he was living alone and working as a farm laborer. Rosa’s …