This photograph doesn’t look like much at first glance: a pavilion, a ball field, and a few young trees on the north side of Russellville.
But there’s a lot more going on here.
The photograph was taken in June 1972 and is archived with the wonderfully descriptive title, “Park at re-claimed strip coal mine, north side, Russellville, Ark.”
And that’s exactly what we’re looking at.
Coal was strip-mined in the Shiloh Creek area north of Russellville from 1957 until 1962. When Lake Dardanelle was filled in the 1960s, some of the old strip pits were flooded. Other portions remained above water as spoil piles, cuts, and rough mined-over ground.
Some of that land was reclaimed and became Shiloh Park.
That’s why the landscape in the 1972 photograph looks so barren. The pavilion and ball field were there, but the trees were little more than saplings. Much of the ground had been a working strip mine only about a decade earlier.
The reclamation story didn’t end there.
When I started driving Pleasant View Road to work at Arkansas Nuclear One in 1981, the area was still obviously strip-mine country. I drove that road regularly until 2017. I can’t pinpoint from memory exactly when the landscape changed. I just remember that it did.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, the Shiloh Reclamation Project tackled more of the abandoned and flooded mines. Wayne Van Buren, who was Geologist Supervisor at the ADEQ Russellville Field Office, later told me:
“We reclaimed the strip pits under our Abandoned Mined Lands Program. We won a national award for eliminating a dangerous highwall and backfilling extremely dangerous deep waters.”
The spoil piles themselves became part of the solution.
“We saved the City of Russellville a lot of money, too. Leveling the spoil piles allowed for the rapid construction of the ball fields.”
That later reclamation helped transform more of the old mining landscape into the recreational area around Pleasant View Park.
The project was a joint effort involving the Corps of Engineers, the City of Russellville, the Russellville Rotary Club, and the Arkansas Abandoned Mine Land Fund. More than 2,600 trees and shrubs were planted, and the work received a National Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Award in 1993.
And the name Shiloh is much older than either the park or the mines. Shiloh Creek and the old Shiloh locality date well back into the 1800s. There was a Shiloh Church and campground here long before anyone thought about strip mining the coal beneath the ground.
I went back to Shiloh Park recently and photographed the pavilion that stands there today. The original pavilion in the 1972 photograph is gone, replaced by a newer one. The tiny trees have become a mature wooded landscape.
It’s hard to look at Shiloh and Pleasant View today and imagine strip pits, highwalls, and piles of mine spoil.
But that’s the story behind this old photograph.
It isn’t just a picture of a park. It’s a picture of a landscape in the middle of becoming something else.
Three more images: 1972, 2014, and 2026
