Leave it to Pastor Gary Johnson of Calvary Baptist Church, known as a local history expert in his own right to provide the answer. “It was the tallest building on a dirt street,” he said.
Williams confirmed it. Hope’s tallest downtown building to this day was for a time standing next to an unpaved road.
Williams then introduced his father, Keenan, longtime owner of LaGrone-Williams Hardware, who gave a talk that evening on what could be learned from a 1916 nearly panoramic photo of Hope’s downtown, taken from a water tower standing where City Hall is now. About a five feet wide print of the photo was displayed at the front of the Tailgaters Restaurant annex room so that Keenan could point to particular places on it as he spoke.
Another copy, Keenan owns the one displayed during the meeting, can be seen at the Hope Visitor Center and Museum. A much smaller version can be seen on pages 32 and 33 of Joshua Williams’ 2010 Images of America book entitled Hope.
Keenan led off with how it is known the photo was taken in 1916. “This is how we figured out how to date it. It was that on North or on South Pine, the methodist church, the brick building was not there, but the wood frame across the street was.” The methodist church that stood there was known to have been built in 1917, he explained. “Then we got a magnifying glass and looked at the National Building. They hadn't put the windows in yet. So that's it.” That building’s completion dates to 1916.
About the National Building, the builder of the 1939 Hempstead County courthouse B.W. Edwards reportedly said the National was built on cotton bales to prevent it from settling on what was soft, black prairie ground, which sounds like it would be ideal for farming, but as Keenan Williams explained, “You find in the middle of the summer it's hard as a rock, and the ground literally splits. And you can go down, down, down in these cracks.
“There's one where my grandparents’ house was on Pine Street. I remember as a kid, it opened up every summer. Then it rained. What happened? It closed back up. Think what that does to buildings. Welcome to Hope. The other thing related to that is when it doesn't have the sod on top of it, and it's plowed up and it rains. What happens? You get more on your feet than anywhere else, and it sticks.” Williams said.
The decision of where to place a railroad in Southwest Arkansas, Williams said, did not hinge, as many believe, on the opposition of the people of Washington, but on the railroad company’s preference not to have to buy out landowners in the proposed route and on a preference for straight tracks instead of winding ones. So Cairo and Fulton railroad chose a location about ten miles southeast of Washington, which was Hempstead County’s most populous town in the early 1870s.
“The Hope station appeared with the track laying here on February 1, 1872. The track was laid here. And then in August 28, ‘73 they had the official plat of the town, and the first plats were sold in 1873,” Williams said. Because the first plats were lined up to parallel the railroad, Hope’s older section has a different orientation than newer sections built in closer accord with due north and south and due east and west. Currently, greater Hope has the same population that once lived within the older part of Hope built along the railroad.
Williams said Hope is considered a New South town, in that it was created after the Civil War and a railroad town. It also became an industrial town, with Cox Brothers Foundry and Machine Company the oldest of Hope’s industries. In the 1916 photo, “what you find is right at the edge of where the streets change beyond that, and you see in this picture are huge buildings for the Temple Cotton Oil company, where you took cotton seed, squished it, made oil, and shipped it out on tankers, where you had the Cox and Cassidy Machine Shop and Foundry to make the equipment to sell.”
Hope in those days had machinists with the skill to convert a plan for a piece of equipment from drawings to blueprints to wood patterns to sand casting molds and then to the metal piece of equipment. The parts for the Klipsch Horn speakers were done in this way. Videos on Youtube called “Pouring Iron 1991 A” and “Pouring Iron 1991 B” show the process of creating iron equipment in the Cox Brothers Foundry before that was discontinued.
“They are about 20 minutes, and it's amazing. First off, I know all the people in the picture, and you would too, but the amazing thing is, here are these men with glasses and t-shirts with a big fan blowing, and you see all these sparks going. Just amazing. That's why they don't no longer do it, because it just became, with EPA and such, unfeasible,” Williams said.
A large edifice that no longer exists can be seen in the photo on a street familiar to most Hope residents. “There is a huge building, the planters’ warehouse right here on Hazel. And it covers a block," Williams said. "It’s this beautiful thing, big square building where the cotton was in. And I've seen pictures of the interior where all of these men are dressed up in their Sunday best, and somebody is auctioning off the cotton.”
The diversity of Hope is also evident in the historical record of the town’s early days, with Roy Anderson’s Dear Folks letters, published in the Hope Star, describing a one-man police force named Augustus Kyle, who served as a captain of the Confederate 20th Arkansas and commander of the Hempstead Rifles during the Civil War and gained a lot of weight afterward. “I’ve never had anybody that I've read mention that he carried a gun. He carried a club … he had a young boy with an umbrella following him to keep him out of the sun, but he had this big chair, and he would sit there, and he ruled the town,” Williams said.
Williams mentioned the writing of Hope native Electa Wiley about the black elite families who lived on North Hazel, like the Yergers, the Davenports and the Strongs. “Some of those houses beautifully still exist, and the other [members of the] black community looked up to them as role models.”
One of the founders of the city, meanwhile, was a member of the Union Army. “The other person I want to mention is the only Yankee buried in Rose Hill Cemetery. His name was Walter H Shiver, and in June 1865 as a soldier in the 12th Michigan, he came to garrison in Washington and Hempstead County. and lo and behold, a few years later, he came back down here and set up shop and married someone. I often wonder if he found the person when he was a soldier down here, but whatever the case, he moved down and became one of the founders of the town.”
Williams mentioned the government of Hope giving the Kansas City Southern Railroad the south to north-running Vine Street, which was then named Louisiana Street and became the connection of Hope to Minden, Shreveport and New Orleans. The train still runs on the track built on that street. Williams remembered going with his father to meet the train when it would let out passengers.
“Out there would be a man, a black man in an absolute white, starched uniform standing there from the Barlow Hotel. The Capitol [Hotel] was gone by then, but before that was two of them ready to take their bags, to take them to either the Barlow or the Capitol, but you would see the train the next day and repeat the process after spending the night here. In the same way, from the north came a branch of the Frisco and St Louis, San Francisco, and tie it in. And they meet on Ninth Street. Down here is where the two yards meet,” Williams said.
Williams also described seeing from his store when dirt work was going on to create The Hub and seeing large boards being raised to the surface. These were the boards that were used as sidewalks at the time his grandfather had what was called a racket store on East Second. “We've got a picture of it, about 30 feet that he had exposed, and it went under The Hub. And I have no idea how far what existed went, but it went at least 30 feet from the alley over there,” Williams said.
Williams closed by saying that as this year, Hope’s sesquicentennial year, proceeds, “I hope we’ll have more to talk about along the way.”
Meetings of the Hempstead County Historical Society will take place on the last Tuesdays of every month at 7:00 p.m. at the Tailgaters Annex on South Main. It’s only $10 a year to become a member.
