Arkansas History

Flood control efforts in northeast Arkansas’s Sunken Lands yielded an engineering marvel: The Marked Tree Siphons.

Drainage District Number Seven in Poinsett County was formed in 1917 to help regulate flooding of the Saint Francis River. The Steep Gut Floodway, lock and sluiceway were completed in 1926, but seven years later forty feet of the sluiceway dropped and part of the levee collapsed when the fine sand at its base washed away.

At seven thousand acres, Holla Bend National Wildlife Refuge offers a resting place for migratory birds as well as a permanent home for hundreds of species.

The area housing Holla Bend was created in 1954 when an Arkansas River flood control project straightened a section of the river and created an island between the old and new channels. It was turned over to the Department of the Interior three years later to serve as a wildlife refuge.

A pair of colleges in Arkadelphia have maintained a rivalry since 1895 with an annual football game dubbed “The Battle of the Ravine.”

Ouachita Baptist and Henderson State University are located across Highway 67 from each other, making their annual meeting the only game in the country where the visiting team walks across the street for the competition. Some of the scores have been one-sided, with Ouachita winning 66 to zero in 1919 and Henderson taking the 1932 game 62 to nothing.

On Thursday, February 21, 1889, national suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony spoke at the Capital Theater in Little Rock. The following day, the Arkansas Gazette reported on the event.

Electing not to include or describe any of Anthony’s remarks, the writer claimed that “No very large percent of the women of America embrace Miss Anthony’s radical view [and]…It is a truth that suffrage is a boon not desired by a very heavy majority of the most refined and intelligent women of the country.

Susan B. Anthony is, perhaps, the most famous name in the American women’s suffrage movement, and with good reason. Born into a family of reformers, Anthony was active in the temperance movement and she was also an ardent and tireless abolitionist. But she was most passionate about gaining for women the right to vote.

Early in February of 1889, the Woman’s Chronicle began advertising the upcoming visit to Little Rock by Susan B. Anthony. The newspaper billed the event as “Miss Anthony’s First Visit South.” After her lecture on “What Woman Wants,” the Chronicle reported that “Miss Anthony proved very conclusively…that what women needed was the ballot."

The 1883 Eclectic Society’s debate on women and the right to vote reveals several prominent pro-suffrage Arkansas men. S.F. Clark, a Railroad director, said the notion that “the right to vote would unsex a woman was absurd,” calling the argument “weak, shallow – and mere poppycock.”

The February 1883 debate by the Little rock Eclectic Society sheds light on a variety of male attitudes about suffrage for women. One of the debaters, Rabbi Benson of B’nai Israel in Little Rock, said this: “It is woman’s [duty] to love, cherish, and obey,” and “These masculine women traveling about the country crying for woman’s rights are a disgrace to their sex.”

On Tuesday, February 6, 1883, the Little Rock Eclectic Society held a debate on women’s suffrage. This debate provides a snapshot of the attitudes of a variety of male Arkansans. It began with an essay presented by Major Charles B. Moore, a former Confederate soldier and current State Attorney General.

The wilds of Washington County near Strickler are home to an unusual facility: a decommissioned nuclear reactor.

The Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor, or SEFOR, was completed in 1969 to test whether breeder reactors, which use fast neutrons to create more fuel than they consume, could be used to produce electricity. Though it never achieved that purpose, SEFOR did show that plutonium could be used as reactor fuel instead of uranium.

Mississippi County Community College – now Arkansas Northeastern College – was once in the vanguard of solar energy use.

In 1976, the U.S. Department of Energy chose the fledgling campus to receive the Total Energy Solar Photovoltaic Conversion System, which would generate electricity and hot water. Through the $8.8 million project, 270 solar collectors, each measuring twenty by seven feet, were installed, and the main building was designed with vaulted glass ceilings and wind-breaking devices for energy efficiency.

A 1905 fire devastated downtown Hot Springs and brought a new look to the town’s architecture. Hot Springs was a tourist mecca in the early 1900s, with some coming for the healing waters and others for the rampant illegal activities.