News

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

 

Join us on Sept 27 for Dr. Jeffery Mitchem’s presentation on recent excavations at the Parkin Archeological Site. The excavations revisit the remains of a large wooden post, first seen by archaeologists in the 1960s, embedded in a Native American mound at the site. Archeologists have theorized the wood might be the remains of the cross erected by Hernando de Soto in 1541.

 

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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)

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)

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 o

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

n 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.

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.

 

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

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

The town of “New Greenville,” founded behind Island 83 on the Mississippi River in 1865, was located on the plantation of Harriet (Blanton) Theobald. Theobald’s home place was outside of the new town.  After her death, her surviving son, Orville M. Blanton, subdivided her personal property into Blanton Park, est. in 1886.  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. The story is explained of 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.

 

Ann Rayburn Paper Americana Collection, Special Collections, University of Mississippi Libraries

 

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

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

The town of “New Greenville,” founded behind Island 83 on the Mississippi River in 1865, was located on the plantation of Harriet (Blanton) Theobald. Theobald’s home place was outside of the new town.  After her death, her surviving son, Orville M. Blanton, subdivided her personal property into Blanton Park, est. in 1886.  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. The story is explained of 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.

 

Ann Rayburn Paper Americana Collection, Special Collections, University of Mississippi Libraries

 

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

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

https://uark.libguides.com/c.php?g=204439&p=1362904

Trulock Family Papers, Correspondence, 1837-1869 are held by the University of Arkansas Special Collections

 

Lakeport Legacies & Book Signing

Yankee Mistress of the Old South: Plantation Life in the Arkansas Delta, 1847-1866
Dr. Gary Edwards (Arkansas State University-Jonesboro)
Lakeport Plantation, 601 Hwy 142, Lake Village, AR
Thursday, June 21 at 6:00 p.m.

Amanda Beardsley Trulock (1811-1891) is a rare example of a northern woman, born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who married a Georgia cotton planter; later migrated to Arkansas; and eventually became a plantation proprietor and sole mistress of 62 slaves near Pine Bluff. Like many slaveowning widows of the Old South, Trulock was a very competent financial manager. But she delegated many other responsibilities, in fact a surprising amount, to an enslaved man, Reuben. And through her relationship with him she reveals a distinctive example of antebellum enslavement, which combined an unusual mixture of white leniency and black autonomy. Trulock also shares some things in common with the tiny handful of New England women who married into slavery at the time. Most informative of these commonalities (or perhaps the most surprising, depending on one’s preconceptions) was her immediate acceptance and selective advocacy of slavery during her twenty-nine years of residency in the South during both war and peace.

A limited number of copies of Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times, edited by Cherisse Jones-Branch and Gary T. Edwards will be available for purchase. The book includes Dr. Edwards’ chapter on Trulock. $35



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

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

 

Robert Fullford was born in the last remaining log cabin on the Yellow Bayou Plantation in 1947 to Bessie Porter. Today, Mr. Fulford lives in Dermott and is a writer, storyteller, musician.

Both of Mr. Fulford’s books will be available for purchase:

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

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



Lakeport Legacies · April 26 · Rev. Green Hill Jones: From Slavery to the State House · Dr. Blake Wintory (Lakeport Plantation)

Lakeport Legacies · April 26 · Rev. Green Hill Jones: From Slavery to the State House · Dr. Blake Wintory (Lakeport Plantation)

Lakeport Plantation director, Dr. Blake Wintory, will begin 2018’s Lakeport Legacies with the presentation “Rev. Green Hill Jones: From Slavery to the State House” on April 26.

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.

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

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