As towns across rural Arkansas continue to bleed population, the most obvious victims often are the churches. I recently saw an online plea for funds to help keep up a Presbyterian church building at Helena, a once-beautiful city on the banks of the Mississippi River that has been losing residents for decades.
Dr. Thomas William Hardison, physician for the Fort Smith Lumber Co., had a dream. He thought company holdings on Petit Jean Mountain should be a national park.
Frances Rowena Mathews Hunt was born on June 6, 1874, in Des Arc, to Julia Ann Wair Mathews and Allen C. Mathews, a Confederate veteran and editor of the town s newspaper, the Des Arc Citizen. While growing up, she was educated in the Des Arc schools and learned the printing trade at her father s newspaper office.
On Jan. 15, 1923, after a bitter 2-year strike on the Missouri & North Arkansas Railroad, an angry mob assembled in Harrison, the railway s headquarters. The vigilantes hanged one striker, publicly stripped and whipped others and ran the remaining strikers out of Arkansas. One of the longest railroad strikes in American history, it was the only one ended by a mob action.