Category Archives: History

Tales of the Crypt Tonight

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A Parkview student portraying former LR Mayor Woodson.

A Parkview student portraying former LR Mayor Woodson.

The ghosts of Little Rock past will arise tonight at Mt. Holly Cemetery for the 19th Annual Tales from the Crypt.

Held the second Tuesday of October, Tales of the Crypt is an annual Mount Holly event.  Under the direction of Fred Boosey & Tamara Zinck, drama students from Parkview Arts & Science Magnet High School are each given a person buried in the cemetery to research. They then prepare short monologues or dialogues, complete with period costumes, to be performed in front of the researched person’s grave.

Among the highlights this year John and Lucinda Kumpe, Paramount actor Eleanor Counts, Richard Flannigan (who served as Mt. Holly Sexton), Myra Blackbun, Albert and Mollie Stocking and former Little Rock Mayor James A. Woodson.

Award-winning local costumer Debi Manire will once again provide the wonderful historical characters’ costumes.  Audiences are led through the cemetery from grave to grave by guides with candles. Although it takes place around the same time as the American holiday Halloween, the event is meant to be historic rather than spooky.  Many local teachers award extra credit to students who attend.

The Nineteenth Annual “Tales of the Crypt” will be sponsored by Mount Holly Cemetery Association and Parview Arts-Science Magnet High School.

The event will be held  at Mount Holly Cemetery, 1200 South Broadway, Little Rock, Arkansas on Tuesday, October 8, 2013, from 5:30 pm until 8:30 pm.  Admission is free to the public, however donations to Mount Holly Cemetery are appreciated and aid in the maintenance of the cemetery.

Little Rock Look Back: Mayor Warren E. Lenon

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Mayor LenonOn October 8, 1867 in Panora, Iowa, future Little Rock Mayor Warren E. Lenon was born.  He was one of eleven children of John D. and Margaret M. Long Lenon.

Lenon came to LIttle Rock in 1888 after finishing his schooling in Iowa.  He helped set up an abstract company shortly after his arrival.  In 1902 he organized the Peoples Savings Bank.  Among his other business interests were the City Realty Company, the Factory Land Company, the Mountain Park Land Company, and the Pulaski Heights Land Company.

From 1895 to 1903, he was a Little Rock alderman, and in 1903, he was elected Mayor of the city. A progressive Mayor, he championed the construction of a new City Hall which opened in 1908.  At the first meeting of the City Council in that building, Mayor Lenon tendered his resignation.  His duties in his various business interests were taking up too much of his time.

Mayor Lenon had been a champion for the establishment of a municipal auditorium. He had wanted to include one in the new City Hall complex. But a court deemed it not permissible under Arkansas finance laws at the time.  He also worked to help establish the first Carnegie Library in Little Rock which opened in 1912.

In 1889, he married Clara M. Mercer.  The couple had three children, two of whom survived him.  A son W. E. Lenon Jr., and a daughter Vivian Mercer Lenon Brewer.  She was married to Joseph Brewer, a nephew of Joseph Taylor Robinson, after whom the City’s eventual municipal auditorium would be named.

Mayor Lenon died June 25, 1946 and is buried at Roselawn Cemetery.  Lenon Drive just off University Avenue is named after Mayor Lenon.

Butler Center Honors Mark Christ, Pat Carr at A PRIZED EVENING

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Tonight at 6:30, the Central Arkansas Library System Butler Center for Arkansas Studies will host the annual “A Prized Evening.”  The 2013 Booker Worthen Prize will be presented to Mark Christ and the 2013 Porter Fund prize will be given to Pat Carr.

christ_markAs one of the most fertile regions in the South, the Arkansas River Valley was highly contested territory during the Civil War. While the Siege on Vicksburg raged, equally important battles were fought here in Arkansas. This struggle is the topic of Mark Christ’s nonfiction work, Civil War Arkansas 1863, which has been selected to receive the 2013 Booker Worthen Literary Prize, awarded by the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS).

Christ, community outreach director for the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, has edited a number of books and articles about Civil War events in Arkansas. He is a member of the Arkansas Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission, serves as chairman of the board of directors of the Arkansas Humanities Council, and is a member of the board of trustees of the Arkansas Historical Association. Christ recently received the 2013 State Preservation Leadership Award from the Civil War Trust, the largest nonprofit battlefield preservation organization in the United States.

The Worthen Prize is awarded each year to an author living in the CALS’s service area whose work is highly regarded. It is named for Booker Worthen, who served twenty-two years on CALS’s board of trustees.

 

Pat CarrThe 2013 Porter Fund Literary Prize will be given to Pat Carr. The Porter Fund presents the award annually to an Arkansas writer who has accomplished a substantial and impressive body of work that merits enhanced recognition

 

She has a B.A.(Phi Beta Kappa) and an M.A. from Rice, a Ph.D. from Tulane, and she’s taught literature and writing in colleges all across the South. She’s published sixteen books, including the Iowa Fiction Prize winner, The Women in the Mirror, and the PEN Book Award finalist, If We Must Die, and she’s had over a hundred short stories appear in such places as The Southern Review, Yale Review, and Best American Short Stories.

 

Her latest short story collection, The Death of a Confederate Colonel, a nominee for the Faulkner Award, won the PEN Southwest Fiction Award, the John Estes Cooke Fiction Award, and was voted one of the top ten books from university presses for 2007 by Foreword Magazine.

 

Carr has won numerous other awards, including a Library of Congress Marc IV, an NEH, the Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Award, an Al Smith Literary Fellowship, and a Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt Writing Fellowship in Lausanne, Switzerland.

 

A writing text, Writing Fiction with Pat Carr appeared from High Hill Press in June, 2010, and her autobiography, One Page at a Time: On a Writing Life was published by Texas Tech University Press in December, 2010. Pat Carr’s new novella, The Radiance of Fossils, came out in July 2012 with Main Street Rag Press. Her latest published work, Lincoln, Booth, and Me: A Graphic Novel of the Assassination by Horatio, the Cat as told by Par Carr was published in May 2013 by El Amarna Publishing.

Past honorees of the Booker Worthen prize are: 2012-The Thousand-Year Flood: The Ohio-Mississippi Disaster of 1937, David Welky; 2011-The Broken Vase, Phillip H. McMath and Emily Matson Lewis; 2010-Ruled by Race: Black/White Relations in Arkansas from Slavery to the Present, Grif Stockley; 2009-The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, Trenton Lee Stewart; 2008-Turn away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis that Shocked the Nation, Elizabeth Jacoway; 2007-A Brief History of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier; 2006-Promises Kept, Sidney S. McMath (posthumous); 2005-Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Families and the Settlement of the Cotton Frontier, Carolyn Earle Billingsley; 2004-The Truth about Celia, Kevin Brockmeier; 2003-Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three, Mara Leveritt; 2002-Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919, Grif Stockley; 2000-The Boys on the Tracks, Mara Leveritt; 2001-The Rumble of a Distant Drum: The Quapaws and Old World Newcomers, 1673–1804., Morris S. Arnold; 1999-Arkansas, 1800–1860: Remote and Restless, S. Charles Bolton.

Previous recipients of the Porter Fund prize are: 2012-Margaret Jones Bolsterli (Non-Fiction); 2011-Bill Harrison  (Fiction); 2010-Bob Ford  (Playwriting); 2009-Roy Reed  (Non-Fiction); 2008-Trenton Lee Stewart  (Fiction); 2007-Greg Brownderville  (Poetry); 2006-Donald “Skip” Hays  (Fiction); 2005-Shirley Abbott (Non-Fiction); 2005-Constance Merritt  (Poetry); 2004-Michael Burns  (Poetry); 2003-Kevin Brockmeier  (Fiction); 2002-Ralph Burns  (Poetry); 2001-Morris Arnold  (Non-Fiction); 2001-Fleda Brown  (Poetry); 2000-Jo McDougall  (Poetry); 1999-Grif Stockley  (Fiction); 1998-Michael Heffernan  (Poetry); 1997-Dennis Vannatta  (Fiction); 1996-David Jauss  (Fiction); 1995-Norman Lavers  (Fiction); 1994-Werner Trieschmann  (Playwriting); 1993-No Prize was awarded; 1992-Andrea Hollander Budy  (Poetry); 1991-Crescent Dragonwagon  (Fiction); 1990-James Twiggs  (Fiction); 1989-Hope Norman Coulter  (Fiction); 1988-Paul Lake  (Poetry); 1987-Donald Harington  (Fiction); 1986-Buddy Nordan  (Fiction); 1985-Leon Stokesbury  (Poetry).

 

 

Sen. David Pryor speaks, Mayor Stodola an honoree at Quapaw Quarter annual meeting tonight

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QQAThe Quapaw Quarter Association will host its annual membership meeting on Wednesday, October 2 in the Ottenheimer Theater at Historic Arkansas Museum.  The evening will begin with a 5:30 p.m. reception in the atrium, the membership meeting will begin at 6:00 p.m.  Nonmembers of the organization are invited to join at the door.

Board members standing for re-election this year are:
Chuck Cliett
John Herzog
Gabe Holmstrom
Cheri Nichols
Shana Woodard

Following a short business meeting, the Greater Little Rock Preservation Awards will be presented to projects in SoMa, the Governor’s Mansion Historic District, MacArthur Park Historic District and Main Street Commercial Historic District.  Anthony Black will receive the Peg Smith Award for his many years of exemplary volunteer work on QQA projects and programs.  Mayor Mark Stodola will receive the Jimmy Strawn Award.  Since 1980, the QQA has presented its most prestigious award to “someone whose efforts on behalf of the preservation of Greater Little Rock’s architectural heritage are an inspiration to the entire community.”

Senator David Pryor will join the QQA as guest speaker to close out the evening.

The Quapaw Quarter Association’s mission is to promote the preservation of Little Rock’s architectural heritage through advocacy, marketing and education.

Incorporated in 1968, the QQA grew out of an effort to identify and protect significant historic structures in Little Rock during the urban renewal projects of the early 1960s. Throughout its existence, the QQA has been a driving force behind historic preservation in Greater Little Rock.

Rhea Roberts serves as the executive director.

Legacies & Lunch today at noon – History of Weapon Laws in Arkansas

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legaciesLegal issues of violence and gun possession were as prevalent in Spanish colonial Arkansas as they are today. Dr. Michael Dougan, distinguished professor of history emeritus of Arkansas State University, will discuss the history of Arkansas’s anti-gun laws in his talk, “Black Powder & Bowie Knives:  Violence and the Law in Arkansas,” at noon on Wednesday, October 2, in the Main Library’s Darragh Center, 100 Rock Street.

The talk is part of Legacies & Lunch, a monthly lecture series hosted by the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, a department of the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS).

Early American Arkansas passed a law against carrying concealed weapons that triggered a major case for the newly established Arkansas Supreme Court. The majority upheld the law, and anti-gun laws remained a part of Arkansas until well into the twentieth century.

Legacies & Lunch is free, open to the public, and supported in part by the Arkansas Humanities Council.  Attendees are invited to bring a sack lunch; drinks and dessert will be provided.

Anson discusses Alexander the Great to kick of 2013-14 Evenings with History

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Ed-AnsonThe Evenings with History series, sponsored by the UALR History Institute kicks off the 2013-2014 series tonight.  This year’s series will focus on how the study and writing of history is done.

The six sessions of the 2013-2014 Evenings with History series will be on the first Tuesday of October, November, and December of 2013 and February, March, and April of 2014.

They are held at the Ottenheimer Auditorium in the Historic Arkansas Museum at 200 E. Third Street in Little Rock. Historic Arkansas’s downtown location and the museum’s adjacent parking lot at Third and Cumberland make the sessions convenient and pleasant to attend.

Refreshments are served at 7:00 p.m., and the talk begins at 7:30 p.m.

An individual subscription to the series, at $50 annually, includes admission to all six lectures.

Tonight, Edward Anson discusses “The Character of Alexander the Great.”

Professor Anson has been working for many years examining aspects of the life of Alexander the Great but wanted to write something about who he was as opposed to what he did. Ancient history presents unique problems for the historian. Sources seldom are contemporary with the topic studied. Standards of behavior often do not coincide with those of today.

This talk examines Professor Anson’s efforts to establish the character of Alexander, which resulted in his new book, Alexander the Great: Themes and Issues. Simply detailing what Alexander did produces serious difficulties, but getting into the mind of someone who lived more than two thousand years ago turns out to be even more difficult. Anson offers insights into how the historian uses the evidence of antiquity to overcome these barriers.

Edward M. Anson has authored or edited seven books, including Alexander the Great: Themes and Issues (2013); After Alexander: The Age of the Diadochi (323-281 BC) (2013); Eumenes of Cardia: A Greek Among Macedonians (2004), and more than thirty articles in journals, including Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, The Journal of Cuneiform Studies, The Journal of the American Oriental Society, Classical Philology, and The American Journal of Philology; twelve book chapters, and over fifty encyclopedia articles. He received his PhD from the University of Virginia and is currently Professor of History, a faculty senator, and a former President of the University Assembly.

Corporate sponsors for the 2013-2014 season include Friday, Eldredge, & Clark; Union Pacific Railroad; Wright, Lindsey, and Jennings; and the Teaching American History Program of the Little Rock School District.

Support and gifts in kind are provided by the UALR Ottenheimer Library; Historic Arkansas Museum, a museum of the Department of Arkansas Heritage; UALR Public Radio—KUAR-KLRE; UALR public television; and Grapevine Spirits.

Orval Faubus, Language of Segregation – topic of UALR talk this evening

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ualr logoDr. Lisa M. Corrigan, Assistant Professor of Communication and Chair of the Gender Studies Program at the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas will be the features speaker this evening at the UALR Cooper Honors and Gender Studies Program Lecture.  She will deliver a lecture entitled “Orval Faubus and the Language of Segregation:  Sexualized Violence and Racial Anxiety during the Little Rock Crisis.”

Dr. Corrigan uses the Orval Faubus Collection at the University of Arkansas to examine the rhetorical strategies embraced by the former Arkansas governor during the desegregation of Central High School.  In examining Faubus’ public speeches and private correspondence at the height of the desegregation crisis, her lecture will cover how he sought to control the rhetorical situation in Little Rock and how racial anxiety was articulated as sexual anxiety.

The program will take place at 6pm in the Dickinson Hall Auditorium on the UALR campus.  At 5:30 there will be a reception.