The general gloom of the pandemic was pushed aside recently by the news that my younger brother, Rick, is moving back to Arkansas after decades of living in Texas. He is building a home near his daughter's farm in Pike County.
I'm looking forward to spending more time in a rural southwest county I do not know well. It has an interesting and diverse history, but it is geology which makes Pike County unique.
The county is home to America's only diamond mine and the birthplace of "rhinestone cowboy" Glen Campbell.
Pike County's unusual geology is due in part to its location between two natural divisions, the Gulf Coastal Plain and the Ouachita Mountains. The southern half of the county was covered by the waters of the Gulf of Mexico for millions of years, resulting in a flat to rolling terrain, and soils which conceal a variety of sediments, huge deposits of gravel and sand, clays, and gypsum.
The northern half falls within the southern reaches of the Ouachita Mountains, and the fall line separating these halves provided significant water power to run mills.
Near that fall line can be found Crater of Diamonds State Park, reputed to be the only diamond mine in the world open to the public. Geologists believe that almost 100 million years ago a volcano brought to the surface diamonds which had long been hidden in the magma, adding to the diversity of lands so recently freed from the shallow oceans.
Those diamonds lay undiscovered until 1906, when nearly illiterate Pike County farmer John Wesley Huddleston noticed something unusual on his small farm near Murfreesboro. It was a hot August afternoon when he found two small stones which he thought might be valuable.
Since no one in Murfreesboro could assay rough diamonds, they were sent to Little Rock, and then on to Tiffany & Co. in New York. Once word got out about their authenticity, Pike County was besieged by would-be miners. During the past 114 years, hundreds of small diamonds have been found, and more than a few larger ones.
Pike County was established on Nov. 1, 1833, by the Territorial legislature and named for famed explorer Zebulon Pike, better known as the namesake for Pikes Peak in Colorado. The county seat, Murfreesboro (originally spelled Murfreesborough), received a post office in 1836, though it remained a small town with only 200 residents as late as 1900.
Pike County also grew slowly, having only 4,000 residents in 1860. Perhaps its most celebrated antebellum settler was a New York-born businessman named Henry Merrell. He is recognized for bringing the industrial revolution to Arkansas.
Merrell began working in a textile factory in New York when he was 14, followed by extensive experience at manufacturing in Georgia, including establishing his own factory. Over time, he became an enthusiastic advocate for industrialization, developing a missionary zeal which caused him to decide to establish a "manufactory" on the frontier of southwest Arkansas.
He later wrote in his autobiography, "I had found the missionary ground for a manufacturer." His goal was "to promote a system of Southern Manufactures, which I hoped would, in the course of time, reconcile Southern with Northern interests, and neutralize the effects of mad and ultra-politicians on both sides."
Merrell used an 1847 map of the U.S. and data from the 1850 U.S. Census to select a location on the Little Missouri River about three miles northwest of Murfreesboro. He arrived in Arkansas in January 1856, bought the site, and quickly began work on a dam on the Little Missouri to power his textile mill. He soon added a flour mill, a sawmill and a company store.
In 1860, Merrill's Arkansas Manufacturing Co. used 150 bales of cotton costing $6,750 to produce 60,000 skeins of thread valued at $15,000. The profit on woolens was not great: 25,000 pounds of raw wool valued at $7,500 brought $10,000 after processing. Twenty men and 10 women worked at the mill. This was apparently the largest manufacturing concern in the state, testimony to the almost total lack of industry even in the late antebellum period.
In 1863, Merrell sold his factory and was soon commissioned by the Confederate army to travel to England to buy machinery for expanding textile manufacturing in the western Confederacy. He was in England when the war ended.
Some of Merrell's education had been at an abolitionist school, yet he seems to have had no trouble siding with the Confederacy. That was not true of all residents of Pike County.
Most of the county residents were small-scale cotton farmers, and few owned enslaved workers. The slave population in 1860 was a mere 227 souls. With the vast majority of residents having no financial investment in slaves, it is not surprising that Pike County was not unified in supporting the Confederacy.
Two companies of volunteers quickly organized and entered Confederate service, and a third company joined later. However, after the initial burst of enlistments, recruitment encountered growing opposition -- especially after rebel deserters returned to the area. Many men were outraged that Southern men of means could legally avoid conscription by hiring what was known as a substitute.
As historian Carl Moneyhon has written, organized opposition cropped up in several counties in southwest Arkansas. In Pike County a shadowy figure named Captain Greer organized a group of men -- rumored to number 300 -- who resisted conscription, and established a headquarters at Greasy Cover high up the Little Missouri River. In early 1863, the Confederates organized an attack on the anti-draft forces, killed several of them, took Greer captive, and hanged him along with an associate.
No major battles were fought in Pike County, although both federal and Confederate forces were present in them -- sometimes simultaneously. Much of the damage inflicted during the war came from irregular partisan units.
Civil War historian Daniel E. Sutherland has concluded: "This is how the Civil War was fought in Arkansas: ambushes, midnight raids, often with civilians treated as combatants and neighbors turned predators."
Yes, "set-piece battles" were fought in Arkansas, Sutherland admits, but "... most of the fighting, most of the terror and suffering in wartime Arkansas came from irregular warfare, and it devastated the land and people."
Pike County was a mess by the end of the war. Many farms were abandoned, businesses were shuttered , and the population shrank to a mere 3,788 residents. Great changes lay in the future, however, for Pike County and the whole region.
Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living near Glen Rose in rural Hot Spring County. Email him at [email protected].