At the 101 South Main Street location, the society has been hosting hour-long talks by historical experts on the city of Hope all year, in keeping with the 150th anniversary year of the town’s founding. Nesbitt’s presentation, which included photography and documents shown on projected slides, emphasized the collections in SARA that concern the history of Hope.
In an introduction to Nesbitt, Keenan Williams began the meeting by describing the history of SARA itself, which was founded in 1978 after an effort began after Hope’s Centennial Year of 1975. Board members Williams, then representing Pike County; Mary Medearis, author of Big Doc’s Girl and a historian of distinction; Charlene Etter; Mildred Smith; Lou Waters and others began collecting materials from 12 counties in the region.
“There are photographs. There are patterns. There are so many amazing things from our history that are there. It's paper, forms, scrapbooks that people have put there, copies of the [news]papers. She's going to tell you about this, but it excites me every time I see something different there,” Williams said.”
Nesbitt explained that though SARA is a separate entity from Historic Washington State Park, it often collaborates with the park for research and programs. It also draws visitors eagerly in search of information. “We have people from all over that come in to do research. Primarily our visitors are family history researchers. But we have historians that come in. We have fiction writers that come in that are trying to get a sense of what the region was like,” she said.
With Hope being the concentration of the Historical Society this year, Nesbitt began with the collection donated to the archives by Harry Shiver, the official historian of the centennial year who helped oversee the compiling and publication of the 1974 book A Commemorative History of Hope, Arkansas. Shiver was the grandson of one of Hope’s founders, Walter Shiver, a Union soldier who returned to the area after being stationed there during the Civil War. As well as containing pictures of the Shiver family, the collection has photos from Harry’s time compiling the Commemorative History as well as copies of that book and other publications from the Centennial effort.
The Richard Hill Collection, Nesbitt said, is named for a Hope-born (1905) and Ashdown-raised teacher whose career was concerned with the visual arts. “He eventually moved to Washington, DC, where he was an art instructor at the National Arts School,” Nesbitt said. “Now, later in his life, he returned to Arkansas, and he lived in Little Rock and then during the 1970s and 1980s especially, he visited and photographed various southwest Arkansas towns, and he died in 1994. Now his photographic collection of Hope includes civic buildings, schools, churches, the train depot, theaters, street scenes, homes and people. … The bulk of his photographs of Hope date from the early to the mid-1970s.” Hill also collected copies of photographs taken of Hope and other towns that are now in the collection.
The Robert B. Walz Collection, named for the Southern Arkansas University history professor born in Ashdown in 1918. “He tirelessly supported studies on Arkansas history and served on many boards throughout the state, including the Arkansas Historical Association,” Nesbitt said. “I believe he was a life member and contributor to that, and then his interest in collecting and preserving old photographs led to a book and a film in 1980 called His Arkansas Land: A Living History. So he did a lot throughout his life, and almost up to the end of his life. That film came out in 1980 and then he died in Magnolia in 1988.”
Nesbitt described Walz’ method of preserving historical context with the photos he copied. “He would copy them, but he would try to document as much information about each photograph as he could, and oftentimes, when he made his copy, he had a little typewritten caption that he photographed with the original image, so that that information was permanently recorded.”
Nesbitt showed a slide depicting a scene from South Main in Hope from about the 1930s showing a large crowd has gathered to see a speaker on a platform. Calvary Baptist Church Pastor Gary Johnson commented, “One of the neat things about this picture is that it's showing the west side of South Main which you don't see nearly as much [in other historical photos].”
SARA’s General Photograph Collection, Nesbitt said, contains photos donated over the years from various individuals. As a sampler of this collection, Nesbitt showed a photo of a parade float from the second decade of the 20th century of young women promoting the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
In the SARA Manuscript Collections is one of Paul Simms’ scrapbooks. The photo shown on the slide projector was of a page showing that he had converted a ledger book for the purpose of collecting correspondence by postcard and clippings from newspapers. “These were a couple of postcards that he wrote home while he was stationed in Los Angeles during World War Two. So I thought those were kind of neat. They lived at 611 East Second,” Nesbitt said.
The Gratiot Family Papers contain a photo of several city leaders standing in front of a building planned to be the new, temporary Hempstead County Courthouse in the event citizens voted to move the county seat to Hope from Washington. “This dates back to 1914. In fact, I think that says October 31st, so it was Halloween, and it was taken just right there next to LaGrone Williams Hardware, where the Recycle Center is,” Nesbitt said.
Keenan Williams, who owns the hardware store Nesbitt referred to, said the building would later be added to, outfitted with windows and used by Hope Auto. The building eventually burned and was replaced with the current building that houses the Melon Patch restaurant and the Rainbow of Challenges’ ROC ‘n Reruns second-hand shop as well as ROC’s recycling center.
Also at SARA is a publicly available vertical file, which are file cabinets organized alphetically containing information on a variety of topics relevant to the 12 counties of the region. Nesbitt described an example of a find she made in which American Library Service in New City, New York wrote in 1972 to the Hope Municipal Library to interest its staff in purchasing a 1929 sketch of the Hope airport, which was then located in an open field across from Amigo Juan’s on the east side of North Hervey Street.
Nesbitt then described the access SARA provides to Hope area newspapers, that both contains and goes beyond the Hope Star, which published from the late 1890s to 2018, when its new owner Gatehouse Media shut it down. “There were other papers, such as the Hope Daily Press, the Hope Journal and then the Southwest Journal, which also all covered the local, regional and national news.” The majority of this collection is available on microfilm or through a subscription to newspapers.com, but many are available to see in bound volumes.
SARA also has many records kept by the government of Hempstead County before they were donated. Most will be from the pre-1939 period. It also has the collection of the Hempstead County Historical Society including its published journals.
One of the most recent acquisitions at SARA has been of the Duffy Family Papers. Starting with Jerome P. Duffy, the family resided in the county starting in the late 19th century. “Jerome married a lady by the name of Anna McDonald, who was from Lewisville, and they had two sons, and then one daughter, whose name was Anna, and she died at age 13. But their sons were Jerome Patrick Duffy and John McDonald Duffy, and they both served in World War One, and they went by Pat and Mac,” Nesbitt said. An intern at SARA has been organizing this collection of letters, photos and other documents.
Keenan Williams said Pat Duffy, during his wartime service on an artillery unit in Belgium, made a deal to import shotguns made by an armory there and sell them in Arkansas. Mac Duffy, who was taken prisoner during the war, has a unique distinction, he said: “Mac was a prisoner of war in the Second World War. And if you go up to Ouachita [Baptist University], there is a big marker there of those who died in World War Two, and you'll see Mac's name on that marker. He was a prisoner of war. Then he showed up after the war.”
In the letter shown in the slide, Nesbitt noted that Mac begins by saying in the letter, evidently addressed to one or both of his parents, “This is your youngest and best child.” He goes on to say that he is not exactly suffering in Europe but that the snows there resemble the storm of 1901. The Duffys ran a hardware store in Hope.
The meetings of the Hempstead County Historical Society occur on the fourth Tuesday of every month at the Tailgater’s Annex. Membership is $10 annually but visitors are always welcome.
