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About a month after the Civil War began, a slaveholding ancestor of current U.S. Congressman French Hill seemed confident about the future. “Lincoln can’t starve me out unless he takes my land...
100 years ago
In 1874, Rev. John M. Lucey, a racially-progressive white Confederate veteran, moved from Fort Smith to his first parish assignment as pastor of St. Joseph's Church in Pine Bluff. He soon founded the Annunciation Academy at St. Joseph Catholic Church and became the driving force behind establishing a vocational school for Black Americans in 1889.
Col. John M. Gracie was known throughout Arkansas and the world in the late 1800s and early 1900s for being the largest cotton plantation owner in the state. Intent on finding his own means of solving the plantation labor crisis brought about by the mass exodus of Black slaves from plantations throughout the South after the Emancipation Proclamation, Gracie visited Italy.