Today at noon at the Old State House Museum, Richard Hartness discusses “Local Hero: Captain Robert Sanders Burke, Home Guard Commander”

The new year’s first Brown Bag Lunch Lecture is presented by Richard Hartness and is the story of a south-central Arkansas farmer/surveyor, turned citizen-soldier, elected by his neighbors to lead them in their defensive quest to save their homes and farms from the ravages of enemy invasion. During the Civil War, Robert Sanders Burke was elected Captain of a group of Montgomery County mounted volunteers, initially called “Burke’s Company,” and by war’s end was mustered into Confederate service as Company “B.” Newton’s group, like many others, was composed primarily of boys too young for conscription and older men, who may have served on other units before joining local “home guard” militias.

Richard Hartness is the president of the Cross County Historical Society and is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Heritage Studies at Arkansas State University, where he is researching information on the first tenured Black professors in Arkansas’s colleges and universities. In February 2013, Hartness was honored by the Cross County Chamber of Commerce as their “Distinguished Citizen of the Year, 2012.”