FORT SMITH -- Plans to throw the city a yearlong bicentennial birthday celebration are gaining momentum as the mayor announced Monday that orders for a commemorative book will be accepted beginning next week.
Mayor Sandy Sanders said orders will be taken beginning Monday for a 248-page coffee table book, Bridging Borders and Time: A Bicentennial Portrait of Fort Smith. The commemorative book is part of a yearlong celebration of the city's history.
"This limited edition book will tell Fort Smith's story, past and present, and offer a glimpse of the future," Sanders said. "This is one book that should be on every coffee table."
Orders will be accepted until mid-July, when production and printing of the book will begin by Bookhouse Group, a 28-year-old publishing house near Atlanta. The book will be available in October, Sanders said. Pre-publication price will be $39.90.
Bookhouse has an information and pre-order page for the book. A link to it has been placed at the bottom of the home page at gofortsmithar.com, the bicentennial website. Other websites providing access for book purchases could be added later.
The book will lead off a year of bicentennial activities starting on Christmas Day, 200 years after U.S. Army Major William Bradford landed on Belle Point on the shores of the Arkansas River with a company of soldiers to build the first fort. The military eventually moved out, but the town remained.
Bicentennial activities will be divided into four themes, one for each quarter of 2018.
The first-quarter theme, arts and culture, will feature activities in performing arts, visual arts, literature, culinary arts and life and culture, according to first-quarter chairman Jim Perry.
Activities will include a daylong cultural event with the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma, the staging of an original play by a local playwright on Fort Smith's history, and re-creation of a concert from the era of Alphonso Trent, a Fort Smith native and jazz band leader who died in 1959..
Chairman Kermit Walsh said there are already 39 confirmed events for the second-quarter theme, which will focus on the city's western heritage.
The events will involve the Clayton House, the restored home of one of Judge Isaac Parker's federal prosecutors; the Fort Smith Museum of History; the National Historic Site; and the U.S. Marshals Museum.
April will be dedicated to the Civil War, Walsh said, and will feature a Civil War hospital set up on the Clayton House grounds with $20,000 worth of Civil War-era medical equipment and an 1800s dentist's wagon.
"That whole year is going to be fun," Walsh said.
The third-quarter theme, homecoming, is designed to encourage people who left Fort Smith to make a return visit and for residents to explore their city, chairman Megan Raynor said.
Events will include the mayor's Fourth of July celebration, the Unexpected art project and alumni reunions for Lincoln High School, Northside High School and Southside High Schools. The Northside and Southside reunions will coincide with their homecoming weekends, Raynor said.
"One thing we really want to encourage people to do, whether they're a civic club or church group or whatever activity they may have planned for 2018, we encourage them to tie that to the bicentennial," Sanders said.
Bradford Randall, chairman of the fourth-quarter theme, the future Fort Smith, said his team is going to try to break the world record for a "lip dub," a video with more than 5,000 people lip-syncing a song. He said he plans to make the video on Garrison Avenue downtown during the annual rodeo parade in May 2018.
"We're going to use this viral video to promote the city as a great place to live, work and play for years to come," he said.
Randall said Grand Rapids, Mich., earned a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records with 5,000 participants in 2011 when its residents performed a nine-minute lip dub to Don McLean's "American Pie" in an effort to push back against Newsweek's claim that Grand Rapids was a dying city.
State Desk on 04/04/2017