Time Period: Early Twentieth Century (1901 - 1940)

Bazooka [Musical Instrument]

Although today it is more commonly applied to the anti-tank weapon widely used during World War II, or to a product of Topps Chewing Gum, the name “bazooka” was originally given to a novelty wind instrument created by native Arkansan radio and film personality Bob Burns. Spanning the musical gap between a trombone and a slide whistle, the bazooka produces a narrow range of notes with a tone that is more comical than dulcet. Burns developed the bazooka one evening, as early as 1905, during band practice at Hayman’s Plumbing Shop in Van Buren (Crawford County). Burns blew into a gas pipe that made a noise described as sounding like a “wounded moose.” Inspired by this, he developed a new …

Beard v. State (1906)

In 1906 and 1907, a notable case made its way through the courts. An African-American man named Govan Beard was convicted and sentenced to death for assaulting a white woman in Phillips County. When the Arkansas Supreme Court twice denied his appeal, and Governor Jeff Davis refused to pardon Beard even though the alleged victim recanted her claims, the case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. Govan Beard is most likely the one-year-old boy listed as Eaton Govan Beard in the 1880 census. At that time, he was living in Helena (Phillips County) with his mother, Chana Beard, and four siblings (Peter, George, Mary, and Walter). By 1900, Govan was still living in Helena with his mother and his …

Bearden Waterworks

The Bearden Waterworks, located on the northwest corner of North Second and North Cedar streets in Bearden (Ouachita County), was constructed in 1936 and installed with assistance from the Public Works Administration (PWA), a New Deal public relief agency. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 5, 2006. As the United States struggled with the effects of the Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration enacted the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) to ease the effects of businesses closing. The act included an organization called the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works (or Public Works Administration), which was created on June 16, 1933, to help finance federal construction projects and create jobs. Though …

Beauvoir College

In 1897, John Jefferson Lee Spence established the Drew Normal Institute in the town of Wilmar (Drew County). On May 27, 1903, the school was “chartered with the privilege of conferring degrees” by the Arkansas Board of Education. Subsequently, the college was renamed Beauvoir College, after the Mississippi estate where Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy, retired. The college was initially a success, but Spence, founder and the institution’s only president, was forced to close the college in 1907. Despite the brevity of its existence, Beauvoir College signaled a new trend in higher education, as the institution sought to meet the higher-educational needs of southeast Arkansas’s working-class and rural population. Educated at the University of Mississippi, Spence came …

Beebe Jail

The Beebe Jail, located in an alley east of the junction of North Main and Illinois streets in Beebe (White County), is a one-story, reinforced-concrete structure built in 1934 with apparent assistance from a pair of a Depression-era federal relief agencies. The Beebe Jail was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 13, 1991. Beebe had been without a city jail for several years when local leaders sought funding through President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Details on which agencies were involved vary. A July 3, 1934, Arkansas Gazette article states that “after having been without a jail for eight years, town officials announced today that a new jail will be erected soon under PWA [Public Works …

Beely-Johnson Post 139 American Legion Hut

Located in downtown Springdale (Washington and Benton counties), the Beely-Johnson Post 139 American Legion Hut was built in 1934 by American Legion members and local citizens. A kitchen was added to the building’s interior in 1937 by the Legion Auxiliary. The one-story building is constructed of rough-cut native stone quarried from a mountain east of Springdale. There have been no major changes to the building over the years. The Beely-Johnson Post 139 American Legion Hut was organized as the Clarence E. Beely Post in 1921, named in honor of Springdale’s first World War I casualty. An American Legion Auxiliary was established in 1922. In 1962, the post’s name was changed to include the name of Elmer Johnson Jr., the city’s …

Bell and Swain v. State

aka: Elbert Thomas (Reported Lynching of)
Examination of the cases of Black youths Robert Bell and Grady Swain shines a powerful light on the ordeals encountered by African Americans accused of committing crimes in Arkansas during the years of segregation. If African Americans managed to avoid the extralegal threat of lynching and made it into the criminal justice system at all, they then faced the prospect of law enforcement officials using torture to extract confessions, the racial prejudices of all-white courtrooms and all-white juries, and the fickleness of state politicians and state government. On the afternoon of Thursday, December 29, 1927, sixteen-year-old Robert Bell and fourteen-year-old Grady Swain were playing outside the white-owned store of William Bunge “Bunn” McCollum in Greasy Corner (St. Francis County). Their …

Bella Vista Water Tank

The Bella Vista Water Tank sits on a small, triangular piece of land at the corner of Cunningham Drive and Cedar Crest Drive in Bella Vista (Benton County). It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on August 14, 1992. The three Linebarger brothers, who developed the original summer resort of Bella Vista, had the 55,000-gallon tank built of native fieldstone in 1927 at a cost of $5,500. The tank was built to provide water to part of their Lake Bella Vista Summer Resort, which they had opened in 1917. The stone mason was Willard Glenn Braithwaite of Bentonville (Benton County). Below the Big Spring just east of Bella Vista Lake, the Linebargers installed hydraulic rams to pump …

Bellaire Court Historic District

The Bellaire Court Historic District is a tourist court in Hot Springs (Garland County). Constructed in 1936, the court consists of eight Craftsman bungalow-style cottages and a manager’s office. The district is also known as the Bellaire Apartments, as it was converted to apartments in the 1970s. Located at 637 Park Avenue, the court is laid out in an L shape. The manager’s office faces Park Avenue, and five units are attached to the rear of the office, perpendicular to the street. The remaining three units are part of a separate building, facing Magnolia Avenue at the rear of the property. An asphalt driveway connects the property to Park Avenue. Little is known about the construction of the court. Located …

Bellingrath House

The Bellingrath House, located in White Hall (Jefferson County), was listed on the National Register of Historic Properties in 1994 as an excellent and singular example of the English-Revival architectural style within White Hall. The house was commissioned by Ferdinand McMillan Bellingrath and his wife, Catherine Oudin Bellingrath, and it remains in the hands of the Bellingrath/Oudin family in the twenty-first century. Ferdinand Bellingrath was the son of Leonard Ferdinand Bellingrath and Mary Jane Castleberry Bellingrath, who originally resided in Georgia before relocating to the Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) area in 1916 to expand their Coca-Cola bottling operation. Ferdinand Bellingrath eventually began helping his father operate the Pine Bluff bottling plant, started by his uncles in 1911, before finally taking over …

Belmont (Pulaski County)

Belmont was a small entertainment hub that developed just outside of the World War I U.S. Army training center at Camp Pike in North Little Rock (Pulaski County). This short-lived boomtown was active between 1917 and 1922, although the exact dates surrounding the final business closures are unknown. The history of Belmont is interwoven with the story of the St. Joseph’s Home and farm in Levy (Pulaski County), and the city of Belmont became a physical representation of the social reform movements and how they intersected with America’s involvement in World War I. Belmont was created specifically to provide “clean and wholesome” entertainment venues for the estimated 65,000 incoming soldiers training at Camp Pike and their visiting families. Military training …

Belmont Missionary Baptist Church and Cemetery

The Belmont Missionary Baptist Church and Cemetery are located in a rural area in the southeastern corner of Jefferson County, roughly half a mile to the west of the intersection of Highway 199 and Belmont Road. Established in 1901, the site is the oldest extant resource in the Moscow (Jefferson County) vicinity representing the African-American post-bellum settlement of southeastern Jefferson County. The property is representative of small, rural African-American churches and cemeteries in the South, and covers roughly two acres. It was listed on the Arkansas Register of Historic Properties on December 4, 2019. The original 1901 church building was lost to a fire around 1945; all of the church records and history were also lost to the blaze, which …

Bennett House

The Bennett House was constructed in 1904 along First Street in Benton (Saline County). The single-family residence was constructed in the Folk Victorian style and features many of the characteristics of this style, including elaborate siding, a front-facing gable with a wing, and an elaborate porch. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 21, 2020. The house is named for William Hosea Bennett, a native of Georgia who traveled west and eventually bought several hundred acres of land in Arkansas along the Saline River. Living in Benton, he was married twice and had nine children. Bennett found considerable success in the pottery and brick business and later became involved in floral ventures as well. He …

Bennett, Henry Garland

Henry Garland Bennett was an Arkansas-born educator who played a transformative role in the development of the state of Oklahoma’s system of higher education. In addition, in his final years, he was appointed to help direct the U.S. State Department’s Point Four Program. He served from 1950 until his sudden death in a plane crash in December 1951. Henry G. Bennett was born on December 14, 1886, in Nevada County. The son of the Reverend Thomas Jefferson Bennett and Mary Elizabeth Bright Bennett, he had three sisters. The family moved from Arkansas to Texas before Bennett’s first birthday but settled in Arkadelphia (Clark County) before he started school. It was there that he grew up and received his early education. …

Benton County Courthouse

The Benton County Courthouse at 106 Southeast A Street in Bentonville (Benton County) is a three-story public building constructed in 1928 and designed in the Neoclassical style by prominent architect Albert Oscar (A. O.) Clarke. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 28, 1988. The first term of the Benton County court was held in the home of County Judge George P. Wallace in April 1837, and a small log courthouse was built on the north side of the Bentonville square in time to house the spring court session in 1838. This served until 1841, when John and William Walker were hired to build a brick building that survived until Union troops burned it in …

Benton, Thomas Hart

Thomas Hart Benton—painter, muralist, and writer from Missouri—developed, along with artists Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, a style of painting in the 1920s that became known as regionalism. Benton was influenced early in his career by a sketching trip he took through northwest Arkansas in 1926. He returned to Arkansas to sketch and paint periodically, primarily in the Buffalo River area. Benton also enjoyed floating and fishing on the Buffalo River and opposed efforts to dam it during the 1960s. Tom Benton was born on April 15, 1889, in Neosho, Missouri. He was the oldest of four children born to Maecenus Eason (M. E.) and Elizabeth (Wise) Benton. M. E. was a lawyer and served as a congressman from …