Category: Lakeport Legacies

Sep132018September 13, 2018February 27, 2019by itswebteam

Lakeport Legacies · September 27 · Casqui and Hernando de Soto’s Cross: Is Parkin the Place? · Dr. Jeffrey Mitchem (Arkansas Archeological Survey)

Posted in event, Hernando De Soto, history, Lakeport Legacies, Native American, News

Casqui and Hernando de Soto’s Cross: Is Parkin the Place?

Dr. Jeffrey Mitchem

(Arkansas Archeological Survey-Parkin Research Station)

Thursday, September 27

Refreshments & Conversation @ 5:30 pm
Program @ 6:00 pm

All four de Soto narratives describe the erection of a cross on the main ceremonial mound at Casqui. The site has been a National Historic Landmark since 1964 and an Arkansas State Park since 1994. Photo courtesy The Archaeological Conservancy.

On July 5, 1541, the Hernando de Soto expedition erected a large wooden cross atop the main ceremonial mound at Casqui. That site is believed by archeologists to be the Parkin Site in Cross County, Arkansas.

In 1966, archeologists discovered the remains wooden post atop in the main ceremonial mound. While samples taken in 1966 dated to the post to between (1515-1663). A new excavation of the post in 2016 holds the promise of precision and a date closer to de Soto’s arrival in what is now eastern Arkansas.

Please Register for this FREE event.

(by phone, email or online)
870.265.6031 ·

601 Hwy 142 · Lake Village, AR 71653


Aug092018August 9, 2018February 27, 2019by itswebteam

Lakeport Legacies · August 23 · Fixed and Fleeting: Some Arkansas State Symbols and Why they Matter · Dr. David Ware (Capitol Historian at Arkansas Secretary of State)

Posted in Arkansas History, event, history, Lakeport Legacies, News

Fixed and Fleeting: Some Arkansas State Symbols and Why they Matter

Dr. David Ware (Capitol Historian at Arkansas Secretary of State)

Thursday, August 23

Refreshments & Conversation @ 5:30 pm
Program @ 6:00 pm

Dr. David War, Arkansas Capitol Historian, is the author of It’s Official!: The Real Stories behind Arkansas’s State Symbols, now in its 2nd edition.

Arkansas’s Capitol Historian, Dr. David Ware, will discuss the utility of symbols, the significance of Arkansas’s earliest adopted symbols and will conclude with some observations on the potential for using the state symbols in interpreting the state’s history, geography and even its economic profile.  And tell a couple of sea stories along the way.

Copies of It’s Official!: The Real Stories behind Arkansas’s State Symbols will be available for purchase for $24 each.

Please Register for this FREE event.

(by phone, email or online)
870.265.6031 ·

601 Hwy 142 · Lake Village, AR 71653


Jul022018July 2, 2018February 27, 2019by itswebteam

Lakeport Legacies · July 19 [Encore July 26] · Old Houses of Blanton Park: Greenville’s Lost Downtown Neighborhood

Posted in event, Greenville, Lakeport Legacies, News

Old Houses of Blanton Park: Greenville’s Lost Downtown Neighborhood

Princella Nowell (Washington County, MS)

Thursday, July 19 — Encore Presentation on Thursday, July 26

Refreshments & Conversation @ 5:30 pm
Program @ 6:00 pm

Blanton Park, Greenville, Miss. looking North, ca 1911. Image courtesy of Ann Rayburn Paper Americana Collection, Special Collections, University of Mississippi Libraries

Blanton Park emerged as a downtown neighborhood in 1886 from Harriet (Blanton) Theobald’s old homeplace. In 1865, Theobald donated part of her plantation for the town of “New Greenville” just behind Island No. 83 on the Mississippi River. After her death, her surviving son, Orville M. Blanton, subdivided her personal property into Blanton Park. Blanton Park became a residential subdivision with homes of family members, professionals, and politicians. On its corners and edges were churches, businesses, clubs, and the Greenville Sanitarium. Washington County Historian Princella Nowell will explain how the “Park” was subdivided, who lived there, and what eventually happened to the homes and churches as they were abandoned to fire, flood, and neglect.

Register for this FREE Event (Registration is closed for July 19)  Register for July 26
(by phone, email or online)
870.265.6031 ·

601 Hwy 142 · Lake Village, AR 71653


Jun082018June 8, 2018February 27, 2019by itswebteam

Lakeport Legacies · June 21 · Yankee Mistress of the Old South: Plantation Life in the Arkansas Delta, 1847-1866

Posted in antebellum, event, history, Jefferson County, Lakeport Legacies, News

Yankee Mistress of the Old South: Plantation Life in the Arkansas Delta, 1847-1866

 Dr. Gary Edwards (Arkansas State University-Jonesboro)

Thursday, June 21

Refreshments & Conversation @ 5:30 pm
Program @ 6:00 pm

http://www.civilwar.si.edu/slavery_visit.html

Winslow Homer’s A Visit from Mistress (1876) exemplifies the tensions between former slaveholders and their former slaves in the years after the Civil War. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans, 1909.7.28

Lakeport Legacies for June 21 will feature Dr. Gary T. Edwards. Edwards, associate professor of history at Arkansas State University, will examine the life of Amanda Trulock (1811-1891). Born and raised in Connecticut, Trulock was widowed in 1849 and found herself the mistress to 62 enslaved laborers on a plantation in Jefferson County. Letters and plantation records reveal a complicated relationship with slaves as she managed her plantation near Pine Bluff.  Edwards’ chapter on Trulock was recently published in Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times (University of Georgia Press, 2018). A limited number of copies will be available for purchase.

Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times — $35

Register for this FREE Event
(by phone, email or online)
870.265.6031 ·

601 Hwy 142 · Lake Village, AR 71653


May142018May 14, 2018February 27, 2019by itswebteam

Lakeport Legacies · Growing Up on Yellow Bayou Plantation: A Conversation with Mr. Robert Fulford

Posted in African American, book signing, event, Lake Village, Lakeport Legacies, News

Growing Up on Yellow Bayou Plantation: A Conversation with Mr. Robert Fulford

Mr. Robert Fulford (Dermott, AR)

Thursday, May 24

Refreshments & Conversation @ 5:30 pm
Program @ 6:00 pm

Robert Fulford, in addition to writing, photographs places and things that remind him of his childhood on Yellow Bayou in the 1950s and 1960s

Lakeport Legacies for May 24 features Mr. Robert Fulford of Dermott with “Growing Up on Yellow Bayou Plantation: A Conversation with Mr. Robert Fulford.” Fulford grew up on Yellow Bayou Plantation, just north of Lake Village, in the 1950s and 1960s. He has written three self-published books about his childhood and experiences on the plantation

Both of Mr. Fulford’s books will be available for purchase (cash or check only):

A Collection of Anecdotes During my Childhood While Living on Yellow Bayou Plantation: Book 1 — $12

A Collection of Anecdotes During my Childhood While Living on Yellow Bayou Plantation: Book 2 — $12

Dark Days of the South: Before & After Segregation — $12

Register for this FREE Event
(by phone, email or online)
870.265.6031 ·

601 Hwy 142 · Lake Village, AR 71653


Apr202018April 20, 2018February 27, 2019by itswebteam

Lakeport Legacies · Rev. Green Hill Jones: From Slavery to the State House · Blake Wintory (Lakeport Plantation)

Posted in event, history, Lakeport Legacies, News

Rev. Green Hill Jones: From Slavery to the State House

presented by

Blake Wintory (Lakeport Plantation)

Thursday, April 26

Refreshments & Conversation @ 5:30 pm
Program @ 6:00 pm

Rev. G. H. Jones served in the Arkansas General Assembly in 1885 and 1889. Courtesy of the Old State House Museum.

Rev. Green Hill Jones was one of over a dozen African-American men from southeast Arkansas who served in the Arkansas General Assembly between 1868 and 1893. Born a slave in Maury County, Tennessee in 1842, Jones was brought four years later to Kenneth Rayner’s Grand Lake cotton plantation in Chicot County, Arkansas. A young man when the Civil War began, Jones joined the Union Army at Memphis in 1863. After the Civil War, he became an ordained minister and received an education in the North. He returned to Chicot County in 1873 and was soon elected county treasurer (1874-1876), county assessor (1876-1878), and to two terms in the Arkansas House (1885, 1889).

Wintory will tell his story from church and school records, and interviews with Jones and others contained in his Civil War-era pension file.

Wintory’s talk is based on his research on Jones and Arkansas’s eighty-six other 19th century African-American legislators. His essay on the subject will be published in May 2018 in A Confused and Confusing Affair: Arkansas and Reconstruction. Edited by Mark Christ, the book will be published by Butler Center Books, a project of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the Central Arkansas Library System.

Read more on Green Hill Jones: here and here

Register for this FREE Event
(by phone, email or online)
870.265.6031 ·

601 Hwy 142 · Lake Village, AR 71653


Mar262018March 26, 2018June 11, 2018by itswebteam

Lakeport Legacies Schedule for 2018

Posted in event, events, Lakeport Legacies, News

April 26 · Rev. Green Hill Jones: From Slavery to the State House  · Dr. Blake Wintory (Lakeport Plantation, Arkansas State University Heritage Sites)

May 24 ·  Growing Up on Yellow Bayou Plantation: A Conversation with Mr. Robert Fulford · Robert Fulford (Dermott, AR)

June 21 · Yankee Mistress of the Old South:  Plantation Life in the Arkansas Delta, 1847-1866 · Dr. Gary Edwards (Arkansas State University-Jonesboro)

July 26 19 · Old Houses of Blanton Park: Greenville’s Lost Downtown Neighborhood · Princella Nowell (Washington County, MS)

August 23 · Fixed and Fleeting: Some Arkansas State Symbols and Why they Matter · Dr. David Ware (Capitol Historian at Arkansas Secretary of State)

September 27 · Casqui and Hernando de Soto’s Cross: Is Parkin the Place? · Dr. Jeffrey Mitchem (Parkin Archeological State Park/Arkansas Archeological Survey)

Lakeport Legacies is a monthly history talk held at the Lakeport Plantation focusing on history in the Delta. Lakeport Legacies meets on the last Thursday from March through October at 5:30 p.m. Note exceptions in the schedule. All events are free and open to the public. Guests are asked to RSVP. The Lakeport Plantation is located at 601 Hwy 142, Lake Village, Arkansas. For more information call 870.265.6031 or visit https://lakeport.astate.edu.

Sep182017September 18, 2017September 18, 2017by itswebteam

Lakeport Plantation to Feature Polk Family Plantations for Lakeport Legacies

Posted in event, events, history, Lakeport Legacies, News, slavery

George W. Polk, a Chicot County planter, completed his home, Rattle & Snap, near Columbia, Maury County, TN in 1845. Courtesy Library of Congress

Lakeport Plantation to Feature Polk Family Plantations

9/18//2017

LAKE VILLAGE — “The Polks’ Plantations and the Creation of Cotton Kingdom in the Old South” will be presented by Dr. Kelly Houston Jones in the latest Lakeport Legacies monthly history talk on September 28 at the Lakeport Plantation, 601 Hwy 142, in Lake Village.

The event gets underway at 5:30 p.m. with refreshments and conversation, and the program starts at 6 p.m. The program is free and open to the public. For more information and to Register, contact Dr. Blake Wintory at 870-265-6031.

Jones will discuss her research on the Polk family’s extensive cotton plantations across Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. The prominent family moved at the center of the historical processes that created King Cotton in the newest parts of the Old South. James K. Polk himself invested in cotton, while his relatives ran cotton plantations in the Mississippi Delta. The Polks’ and their business network represent patterns of cotton investment that characterized the late 1840s and early 1850s and built the slave empire of the Old Southwest.

James K. Polk, who served as president from 1845 to 1849, purchased a plantation in Yalobusha County, Mississippi in 1834. A nephew, William Wilson Polk, owned a large plantation at Walnut Bend in Phillips County, Arkansas and financed his uncle’s presidential run. George W. Polk, a cousin of President James K. Polk, co-owned the Hilliard Plantation on Grand Lake in Chicot County. Polk with his brother-in-law, Isaac Hilliard, owned 151 slaves and 550 acres of improved land in 1850.  In 1845, he built a magnificent Greek Revival home near Columbia, TN he named “Rattle and Snap.”

Dr. Jones is an Assistant Professor of History at Austin Peay State University specializing in the history of slavery. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas in 2014. Her most recent work will appear later this year in Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840-1950, edited by Guy Lancaster.

Lakeport Legacies is a monthly history talk held on the last Thursday at the Lakeport Plantation during the spring and summer. Each month a topic from the Delta region is featured. The Lakeport Plantation is an Arkansas State University Heritage Site. Constructed in 1859, Lakeport is one of Arkansas’s premier historic structures and still retains many of its original finishes and architectural details.

Open to the public since 2007, Lakeport researches and interprets the people and cultures that shaped plantation life in the Mississippi River Delta, focusing on the Antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction Periods.

Arkansas Heritage Sites at Arkansas State University develops and operates historic properties of regional and national significance in the Arkansas Delta. A-State’s Heritage Sites include the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center, Southern Tenant Farmers Museum, Lakeport Plantation, the Historic Dyess Colony: Boyhood Home of Johnny Cash, and the Arkansas State University Museum.

 

Attached image: George W. Polk, a Chicot County planter, completed his home, Rattle & Snap, near Columbia, Maury County, TN in 1845.  Courtesy Library of Congress

###

Press Contact:

Blake Wintory

870.265.6031

bwintory@astate.edu

Lakeport.astate.edu


Jul182017July 18, 2017February 27, 2019by itswebteam

Lakeport Legacies · Ironclads, Cotton & Corn: The Civil War in the Mississippi Delta · Jim Woodrick (Mississippi Department of Archives & History)

Posted in civil war, event, Lakeport Legacies, News

Ironclads, Cotton & Corn: The Civil War in the Mississippi Delta

presented by

Jim Woodrick (Mississippi Department of Archives & History) 

Thursday, July 27

Refreshments & Conversation @ 5:30 pm
Program @ 6:00 pm

“Seizure and Handling of Cotton in the Southwest.” Harper’s Weekly (May 2, 1863), documented the confiscation of cotton hidden at American Bend near the Worthington Plantation by Union troops. According to the paper, “three thousand bales” were “pledged to the British Government at seven cents per pound.”

Many Civil War historians have treated the Mississippi Delta region as a sideshow to more significant campaigns in the east. However, the Delta’s plantations supplied Union forces, witnessed some of the first ironclad battles of the Civil War, and the emancipation of thousands of slaves. Historian Jim Woodrick will explore how the Delta was vital to Confederate interests and was the target of repeated Union attempts to utilize the region’s waterways as an avenue of invasion.

Jim Woodrick, a native of Meridian, Mississippi, serves as Director of the Historic Preservation Division at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, where he worked for a number of years as the Civil War Sites Historian. In that capacity, he managed the Mississippi Civil War Trails program, participated in a number of battlefield and campaign studies with the National Park Service, and worked closely with the Civil War Trust and the American Battlefield Protection Program to identify Civil War battlefield properties in Mississippi for acquisition and preservation. He is a graduate of Millsaps College in Jackson and the author of The Civil War Siege of Jackson Mississippi, published by The History Press (2016).

Signed copies of Woodrick’s book, The Civil War Siege of Jackson Mississippi, will be available for purchase — $24.00 (includes tax, cash or check only, please). 

Register for this FREE Event
(by phone, email or online)
870.265.6031 ·

601 Hwy 142 · Lake Village, AR 71653


Jun142017June 14, 2017February 27, 2019by itswebteam

Lakeport Legacies · A Case Study in Diversity: Southeast Arkansas Legislators, 1868-Jim Crow · Rodney Harris (University of Arkansas)

Posted in event, history, Lakeport Legacies, News

A Case Study in Diversity: Southeast Arkansas Legislators, 1868-Jim Crow

presented by

Rodney Harris (University of Arkansas and Williams Baptist College) 

Thursday, June 29

Refreshments & Conversation @ 5:30 pm
Program @ 6:00 pm

William H. Grey (left) and James T. White (right) superimposed on an 1873 roster of Arkansas State Senators. Grey, born free in Washington, D.C., came to Helena in 1865. He served in the 1868 Arkansas State Constitutional Convention and as a representative in the Arkansas House in 1869. James T. White, native of Indiana, represented Phillips County in the Arkansas House in 1868 and the Senate in 1871 and 1873.

During Reconstruction (1867-1874), Republicans, including the first African American office holders, controlled most political positions in Arkansas. Many people assume that African American office holding ended with Democrats’ political “Redemption” in 1874. Despite Redemption, office holding on the local and legislative level remained quite diverse until 1893. Southeast Arkansas continued to elect Republicans, both black and white, along with Democrats at the county level and to the general assembly. This electoral diversity makes Southeast Arkansas unique and worthy of further examination.

Rodney holds a B.A. in Political Science from Arkansas State University, and a M.A. in History from the University of Central Arkansas. Rodney spent 10 years as a real estate broker, ran for State Representative in 2004, and was named one of the 25 Outstanding Young Executives in Northeast Arkansas.  Rodney wrote his Dissertation, “Divided Saints: Democratic Factions in the 1874 Arkansas Constitutional Convention” under the direction of Dr. Patrick Williams at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Rodney specializes in Political History and Southern History. He will join the faculty at Williams Baptist College in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas this fall.

RSVP to this FREE Event
(by phone, email or online)
870.265.6031 ·

601 Hwy 142 · Lake Village, AR 71653