A little over a week ago, Luke Heffley, VP of the Pope County Historical Association, asked if I would be willing to give a presentation at their September meeting, scheduled for September 1 at Brangus Steakhouse.

They had been holding their meetings at the Check H Grill & Buffet and, after it burned, had to find somewhere else.

They held their August meeting at Central Christian Church on Independence Avenue.

I called Luke the next day and agreed to his proposal. We talked about ideas for what I might discuss.

I had a week to get ready for a 45-minute presentation.

I had spoken in public only twice before. Both were to the quorum court, and I was limited to just a couple of minutes.

Of course, I had been an instructor at the nuclear plant and had plenty of presentation experience.

I planned to cover a fairly wide range of topics, but I wanted to frame them around my use of AI and Wikipedia for research and writing, often on local history. [continue reading…]

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There are people who turn up in history because they were famous, and there are people who become interesting because one small reference leads to another.

Yancey B. Shapard belongs in the second group.

I first noticed him while looking into the political background of the 1872 Pope County Militia War. On May 11 of that year, Pope County Republicans met at Center Valley and elected three delegates to the Republican state convention in Little Rock.

Two of them immediately caught my attention: County Clerk Wallace H. Hickox and School Superintendent W. A. Stuart, both of whom would become deeply involved in the violence that erupted in Pope County only weeks later.

The third delegate was Yancey B. Shapard.

At first, he was just another name.

He isn’t anymore.

The records I’ve found trace Shapard from a slaveholding Southern family through a Virginia college education, a prewar law practice, Democratic politics, service as a wartime judge, apparent Confederate military service, congressional removal of his political disabilities, and finally to leadership of the very Republican Party he had once helped denounce.

It is one of the more remarkable political transformations I’ve encountered in researching nineteenth-century Pope County.

More remarkably, I haven’t found any involvement by Shapard in the Pope County Militia War hostilities. [continue reading…]

A photograph long described as one of the earliest ever made in Arkansas may not have been taken in Arkansas at all.

The image shows a collection of log buildings, fences, and cleared ground beneath wooded hills. A large leafless tree stands in the foreground. The photograph is preserved in an elaborate gold-colored mat and case.

It has been identified as the original Dwight Mission near Russellville, Arkansas, supposedly photographed around 1845 by the painter and early photographer John Mix Stanley.

That identification would make the image historically significant. Photography had reached Arkansas only a few years earlier, and an outdoor view from 1845 would be exceptionally early.

One substantial problem remains: the evidence points to the other Dwight Mission—the one established in the Cherokee Nation in what is now Oklahoma. [continue reading…]