OPINION

REX NELSON: Tale of two parks

William Frank Norrell loved south Arkansas, especially historic sites such as Arkansas Post. Born in August 1896 in the Ashley County community of Milo, he studied at what's now the University of Arkansas at Monticello but was then the Fourth District Agricultural School. Norrell passed the bar in 1920 and began his practice at Monticello. He was a leader in the local Ku Klux Klan, which was a powerful force in south Arkansas in the 1920s.

Norrell was elected to the state Senate in 1930. In 1938, he filed to run for Congress at a time when Arkansas had seven members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The seat had been held by John L. McClellan, who ran unsuccessfully that year against U.S. Sen. Hattie Caraway in the Democratic primary. Norrell, a Democrat like the vast majority of Arkansans in those days, locked up business support early in 1938 and ran unopposed. He represented south Arkansas in Congress until his death in 1961.

In 1959, Norrell introduced a bill to make Arkansas Post part of the National Park System. There was a small state park there at the time, but Norrell knew that federal funding could ensure that the area would be better protected. On July 6, 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill creating Arkansas Post National Memorial. Arkansas Post--I wrote about a recent visit there in Sunday's column--had been in decline since the territorial capital moved to Little Rock in 1821.

"In 1819, when the Post became the capital of the newly minted Arkansas Territory, there were still only 50 or 60 families living there or in its vicinity and 25 or 30 houses in the village proper," Morris "Buzz" Arnold writes in his 2017 book The Arkansas Post of Louisiana. "The Arkansas Gazette began publishing at the Post in the same year, but the removal of the territorial capital (and the newspaper) to Little Rock in 1821 did nothing to lift the settlement's prospects. It remained a small town of a few hundred people with a steamboat landing and a bank, soon reduced to a backwater by the flood of American immigration.

"Washington Irving and other literary visitors in the 1830s and 1840s rhapsodized romantically over the dilapidated colonial houses at the Post, some fully six feet off the ground with galleries all around, just like the ones Captain [Pedro] Rousseau had seen in 1796, relics of a lost French empire, that gave the Post a haunting, antiquated air. Some of these ruinous souvenirs of colonial days survived until 1863, when Union gunboats pummeled them all to rubble in yet another Battle of Arkansas Post, this one the third and by far the most deadly. Still, the Post struggled on as a tiny village of perhaps 100 people and two or three stores well into the 20th century. In 1934, the U.S. Post Office, which had opened there in 1817, closed its doors; it reopened a year or two later, hoping against hope, only to flicker out again, this time for good, in 1941."

In 1929, at the urging of southeast Arkansas legislators, the Arkansas Legislature established the Arkansas Post State Park Commission. The commission purchased 62 acres in the area, though no colonial-era structures remained. A log cabin that had been built in 1877 was moved two miles to serve as park headquarters. Known as the Refeld-Hinman cabin, it had company at the park when the Works Progress Administration built overnight cabins during the Great Depression. In December 1953, the Grand Prairie Historical Society was formed and began collecting artifacts, photographs and documents concerning the region's history. That collection was housed in the Refeld-Hinman cabin.

Arnold writes that passage of the federal bill in 1960 allowed the National Park Service to replace "an underfunded state park that, in an admirable effort to commemorate the settlement's history, had been established at the Post 30 years before. Today, the Arkansas Post National Memorial stands guard over the old town site. It features a fine brick building, ironically a good deal more elaborate than any structure the actual Post had ever seen, that flies six flags, one for each sovereign that had claimed to hold sway over the region. Inside, interpretive exhibits and a movie tell us the story of the Post. Outside, visitors, helped along by explanatory panels that guide the imagination, can stroll the ground where the settlement once sat. But the Arkansas Post of Louisiana itself, though it had breathed the air of four different centuries, has disappeared completely, the victim of war, the relentless river and the malice of time."

The Park Service decided that the Refeld-Hinman cabin and the records it held weren't a fit for its site. In 1963, the historical society purchased two acres at the intersection of U.S. 165 and Arkansas 169. A year later, the Arkansas County Quorum Court appropriated money to operate a county museum there. A lawsuit challenging that appropriation went all the way to the Arkansas Supreme Court, which decided that museum support was a valid expenditure of taxpayer funds.

The society created a complex consisting of a new main building, a pioneer kitchen replica, an office and a carriage house. The Refeld-Hinman cabin was moved to the site in 1967. A 1933 children's playhouse later was moved there. Arkansas County continued to support the museum until 1997, when it became Arkansas Post Museum State Park.

Thus a state park and a National Park Service facility are located within two miles of each other in this remote part of southeast Arkansas.

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Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.

Editorial on 03/21/2018

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