News

Sep072018September 7, 2018September 7, 2018by itswebteam

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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Aug022018August 2, 2018August 2, 2018by 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)

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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Jul182018July 18, 2018July 18, 2018by itswebteam

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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Jun282018June 28, 2018July 2, 2018by itswebteam

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

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

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Jun082018June 8, 2018June 8, 2018by itswebteam

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

Apr032018April 3, 2018May 10, 2018by itswebteam

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

Apr032018April 3, 2018April 9, 2018by itswebteam

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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Mar102017March 10, 2017October 6, 2017by itswebteam

Lakeport Legacies · October 19 · Influence of Southeast Arkansas in the Arkansas Historical Association · Maylon Rice (Arkansas Historical Association)

Lakeport Legacies · October 19 · Influence of Southeast Arkansas in the Arkansas Historical Association · Maylon Rice (Arkansas Historical Association) [program will start at 5:30 due to an earlier sunset]

The leadership of Arkansas Historical Association, formed in 1941, included many prominent southeast Arkansans. Two former Presidents of the AHA were Desha County Judge J. L. “Jud” Erwin and Dermott native Capt. John C. Hammock, a graduate of West Point. Early board members included oilman Col. T. H. Barton of El Dorado and State Senator Lee Reeves, the first director of AETN.

Maylon Rice, a native of Warren, has worked at newspapers all over Arkansas.

Maylon Rice is a native of Warren. It was there he started as an 8th grade “Printer’s Devil” at the Warren Eagle-Democrat, the second oldest continuous business in Warren and Bradley County.
He first ran across an issue of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly there in the Eagle office as the late Bob Newton, longtime editor/publisher of the weekly newspaper told him: “Read this, it will tell you more about Arkansas history than any textbook over at Warren High or any current college textbook in Arkansas.” So his love affair with history and journalism began.

Rice attended Henderson State College in Arkadelphia, majoring in history and journalism. In December 1977, he became one of the youngest newspaper editors at the McGehee-Dermott Times-News serving Desha and Chicot Counties. He has since held newspaper posts at Wynne, Little Rock (working for the iconic John Robert Starr) and later editor of the Benton County Daily Democrat (now the Benton County Record). Even with a career change at age 40, Rice continued to write newspaper columns for The Blytheville Courier and others. After moving back to Northwest Arkansas, Rice, in 1992 re-started his newspaper career at the Northwest Arkansas Times, during that time, Rice was a guest commentator on the AETN Public Affairs program “Arkansas Week.” He was awarded the Arkansas Associated Press’ top correspondents award for his coverage of the University of Arkansas campus for his work at the NW Arkansas Times. Always interested in history, Rice has been a member of the AHA and became a life member in the later 1998. He currently has a newspaper column in the Prairie Grove, Farmington, Lincoln, Siloam Springs and Bella Vista newspapers.

In 2015, Rice was elected to the Arkansas Historical Association Board of Directors. He is currently in his second three-year term on the AHA. He is the present-elect of the Washington County Historical Association in Fayetteville. He is an avid reader of Arkansas books and Arkansas newspapers.

Mar102017March 10, 2017September 14, 2017by itswebteam

Lakeport Legacies · September 28 · The Polks’ Plantations and the Creation of Cotton Kingdom in the Old South · Dr. Kelly Jones (Austin Peay State University)

Lakeport Legacies · September 28 · The Polks’ Plantations and the Creation of Cotton Kingdom in the Old South · Dr. Kelly Jones (Austin Peay State University)

The prominent Polk 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, including his uncle William Polk, ran cotton plantations in the Mississippi Delta. The Polks’ ventures, as well as their kin and business networks, represent patterns of cotton investment that characterized the late 1840s and early 1850s and built the slave empire of the Old Southwest.

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 by the end of this year in Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840-1950, edited by Guy Lancaster.

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Mar102017March 10, 2017August 16, 2017by itswebteam

Lakeport Legacies · August 31 · Grasping Shadows: Evolution of the MS Delta Chinese Heritage Museum · Emily Jones (Delta State University Archives & Museum)

Lakeport Legacies · August 31 · Grasping Shadows: Evolution of the MS Delta Chinese Heritage Museum · Emily Jones (Delta State University Archives & Museum)

Lakeport Plantation’s monthly history talk, Lakeport Legacies, will feature Delta State University Archivist, Emily Jones. Jones will present “Grasping Shadows: Evolution of the MS Delta Chinese Heritage Museum” on August 31 at 6 p.m.

Jones will discuss her work with the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum a museum dedicated to documenting and preserving Chinese history in the Delta.

Opened in 2012 on the campus of Delta State University, the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum, emerged from an oral history project in 1999. By 2010 a collaboration between Delta State Archives and Museum, the city of Cleveland, and the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum, Inc. began thoroughly document the Chinese community through artifacts, oral histories, and family records.

Jones, a native of Greenville, received her B.A. in History from Delta State and an M.A. in Public History from the State Universtiy of West Georgia. She has been the University Archivist at Delta State since 2003.

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Lakeport Legacies is a monthly history talk held on one of the last Thursdays at the Lakeport Plantation during the spring and summer. Each month a topic from the Delta region is featured. The event is free and open to the public. The Lakeport Plantation is an Arkansas State University Heritage Site. Constructed ca. 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. ASU’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.

All are welcome to this Free Event.

Program begins at 6:00 pm