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    Jonesboro and Arkansas's Historic Northeast Corner
    Jonesboro and Arkansas's Historic Northeast Corner
    Jonesboro and Arkansas's Historic Northeast Corner
    Ebook198 pages57 minutes

    Jonesboro and Arkansas's Historic Northeast Corner

    By Ray Hanley and Diane Hanley

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    About this ebook

    Join Ray and Diane Hadley as they retell the history of the communities that make up Jonesboro and Arkansas's Northeast Corner in vintage images.


    When Union soldiers returned North after the Civil War, they brought home stories of a sparsely populated area with bountiful timber and potential for homes and farms. Over the next 50 years, first by wagon train and then by railroads, settlers came to build not only homes and farms but also thriving communities in the Clay, Greene, and Craighead counties of northeastern Arkansas. Today, visitors and residents of the area see the bustle of Jonesboro and the thriving Arkansas State University. Readers of Jonesboro and Arkansas' Historic Northeast Corner will discover Jonesboro as it lived a century ago, a promising town of 7,000 citizens. As the 20th Century opened, modern and attractive towns such as Corning, Piggott, Rector, and Paragould began to thrive. The evolution of these historic areas-from slow-paced villages with dirt roads and horse-drawn wagons to the bustling towns of the late 20th century-is chronicled in this Images of America edition.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateFeb 25, 2002
    ISBN9781439613375
    Jonesboro and Arkansas's Historic Northeast Corner
    Author

    Ray Hanley

    The authors, Little Rock brothers Ray and Steven G. Hanley, with the help of many in the community, capture not only the war but also its influence on the state�s culture for the century that followed. Ray Hanley is an executive with a global technology company, and Steven is the director of volunteer services for a major nonprofit organization serving disabled children. Between them, they have produced a daily newspaper column for 20 years and numerous Arkansas history books.

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      Jonesboro and Arkansas's Historic Northeast Corner - Ray Hanley

      1908.

      INTRODUCTION

      Arkansas is a diverse state, rich in natural resources, scenery, and history. Some of these riches are known around the world, but much is tucked away in the small towns and side roads of this remarkable state. In most efforts to chronicle Arkansas’ past, perhaps one of the areas least covered is the far northeastern corner of the state, including Clay, Greene, and Craighead Counties. Into the early part of the 20th century, this area was a collection of small towns scattered through vast forests of hardwood timber, and it was consequently slower to develop than other areas of Arkansas. Today the region is anchored by the prosperous city of Jonesboro—now some 55,000 strong with Arkansas State University at its heart—helping make the area a vibrant blend of industry, agriculture, and education.

      Over the past century, much of the history of this diverse three-county region was captured on photographs and postcards, providing a window into the lives of the men and women who planted the seeds of the culture and economy of the region today. The towns of Jonesboro, Paragould, Corning, Piggott, and Rector—along with a host of smaller communities—all have stories to tell of their founders: of how they were named and perhaps renamed, of fires and floods, boom and bust. The goal of the authors is to capture a cross-section of the area’s history as reflected in these images, supported by the collected accounts penned on the backs of postcards and shared with us by people who still call the region home today.

      Along with the rest of modern-day Arkansas, the area that would make up these three counties was acquired for the United States when President Thomas Jefferson obtained the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1804. Settlement would come slowly, delayed certainly by one of the strongest earthquakes in U.S. history in 1811. A noted explorer and ethnologist, Henry Schoolcraft recalled in a poem the terror that came with the quake: The Rivers they boiled like a pot over coals, And mortals fell prostrate, and prayed for their souls. The New Madrid Earthquake, which rang church bells as far away as Boston, changed the area’s geography and left its mark on the land even until today. The quake laid waste to much of what was planned by potential settlers to become prime farmland, with parcels sinking as much as 20 feet in some areas. In other locations steep ridges rose up, the channel of the St. Francis River was destroyed, and the natural drainage pattern of the region was changed for decades to come. The federal government had issued bounty certificates to the veterans of the War of 1812 to be redeemed for land in the area, but much of it proved unusable in the aftermath of the massive earthquake.

      Hesitant for fear of more earthquakes, the first four settlers in the area that became Craighead County and Jonesboro bravely paddled small boats down the St. Francis River from the Indian village of Chillicataw, located at what is today Kennett, Missouri. Upon arrival at a spot on the river denoted as Deep Landing, a man named Rittenhouse and his wife decided to begin work on a cabin while the other two pioneers returned upriver to Chillicataw for additional supplies. Upon returning weeks later, they found a completed cabin but with Mr. Rittenhouse dead beside it, a bullet lodged in his head. Mrs. Rittenhouse was found nearby, beheaded—presumably by Indians. Needless to say, this first foray’s tragic ending put a damper on the dreams of other settlers for some time thereafter.

      The first white settler to make a permanent mark on the area was Daniel Martin, who located a farm about 6 miles from present-day Jonesboro in 1829. The 80-acre bounties given to veterans of the War of 1812 were often bought and sold several times, helping to bring more settlers who spread out over the area that makes up present-day Clay, Green, and Craighead Counties. In an area that otherwise more closely resembles the flat, swampy delta, the dominant geographic feature is Crowley’s Ridge, named for pioneer settler Benjamin Crowley. Running for a length of 150 miles north from Helena through northeast Arkansas and varying in height between 250 and 500 feet, the crescent-shaped ridge was created over the centuries by the shifting Mississippi River and perhaps enhanced by the upheaval of the 1812 earthquake. Because the lands on either side of the ridge tended to be low and swampy—especially after the earthquake—settlers were drawn to the heavily timbered ridge; it is upon this high ground that cities like Jonesboro in Craighead County and Paragould in Greene County eventually took root and grew.

      In 1860, the population of Craighead County was around 3,000, but 40 years later in 1900, it had swelled to almost 20,000—with some 4,500 people residing in Jonesboro. While Jonesboro was emerging as the leading city in the region, the growing railroads, timber industry, and agriculture also brought jobs and population to such communities as Paragould in Greene County and Corning, Piggott, and Rector in Clay counties. By the time the year 1900 had rolled by, the residents and visitors to the area were discovering a means of communication that was sweeping the nation, the picture postcard. As evidenced by this book, the postcards that came out of northeast Arkansas, especially in the first two decades of the 20th century, left an invaluable record of the day-to-day lives of the people calling it home.

      Commercially-produced picture postcards in the United States had their start in 1893, when they were first sold at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Over the next decade the fad swept the nation; American Magazine said in 1906: Postal carditis manias are working havoc among the inhabitants of the United States…. There is no hamlet so remote which has not succumbed to the ravages of the microbe postale universelle. Four years later, in 1910, the same publication said, Like a heaven-sent relief, the souvenir postal card has come to the man of few ideas and a torpid vocabulary. No invention in recent years has been so gratefully received. To the thousands of weary travelers it gives a means to say, ‘See for yourself; I can’t describe it.’ The sheer numbers bore out the scope of the fad, for in 1906 the annual consumption of postcards in the U.S. was reported to be almost 800 million cards. Beyond the record of the photos on the fronts of the cards, some of the written messages on the backs offer additional insights into the daily lives of people who worked hard to build their communities and care for their families. It is because of this postcard craze, which faded after World War I, that we today have many of the views of dusty, small-town streets and farm life in northeastern Arkansas during the first score of years of the 20th century.

      It is the authors’ hope that these snapshots from the past will stimulate awareness of the fascinating history of Arkansas’ northeast corner—the story of the land, its people, what has and hasn’t changed—and encourage those working to maintain the cultural and natural resources of the area for generations to come.

      One

      CLAY COUNTY

      The rivers of northeast Arkansas played a vital role in the early settlement of the area because travel by boat was often the only way to penetrate what was once an intractable wilderness of primeval forest and swamps. The first European settlers almost certainly entered the area by water, paddling their boats down the St.

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