I have driven by the Coal Hill exit on Interstate 40 for decades. Every time I see that sign, I am reminded of the "Coal Hill Horrors."
In the late 19th century the town was the site of abuse of state prisoners who were leased out to a coal mining company. The Coal Hill Horrors revealed a penal system that was corrupt and violent. The nationwide publicity it generated increased the already widespread perception of Arkansas as a Gothic place to be entered at one's own risk.
The atrocities also symbolized the failure of the state government of the redeemer Democrats, a conservative coalition that formed in the aftermath of the Civil War. After a long struggle in the courts and through the Brooks-Baxter War in 1874, the redeemers repudiated the old Reconstruction constitution.
The redeemers did not invent the leasing-out of prisoners, a system that began well before the Civil War. But they worsened the situation by enacting a law in 1875 to redefine felony theft as taking anything worth $2 or more. Republicans and Black leaders attacked the bill, openly denouncing it as an attempt to control the recently freed Black population. A dramatic increase in jailings forced the Legislature to raise the felony theft level to $10 in 1881.
In 1873, the Legislature adopted a new lease law that prohibited using prisoners for work inside Little Rock except for public improvements. When a bill was introduced in the 1875 Legislature to authorize convict labor in the capital city, a protest meeting denounced the proposed legislation as "detrimental to the laboring and mechanical classes ..."
The Agricultural Wheel, a farmer organization with many members throughout Arkansas, was a staunch opponent of leasing prisoners. In 1886, the Wheel platform attacked convict leasing as creating "slave pens." The embargo against convict labor in Little Rock continued.
Contractors used prisoners in a variety of ways, usually as laborers in brickyards, large farming operations, railroad construction and coal mining. The law required that prisoners be under armed guard at all times, a provision that seems to have been enforced. The requirement for humane treatment of the convicts was often viewed as optional.
In the spring of 1888, rumors circulated through governmental circles in Little Rock of shocking mistreatment of prisoners leased to the Quita Coal Company at Coal Hill. In late March 1888, Gov. Simon P. Hughes and the other members of the state penitentiary commission made an inspection of the mine, with a reporter for the Arkansas Gazette filing a detailed story.
The newspaper headline summarized shocking discoveries: "The light thrown on the Coal Hill convict camp through an Official Investigation -- no hearsay, but Blood-Curdling Facts." The prisoners had been grotesquely abused, starved, forced to sleep in their work clothes on vermin-infested corn shuck mattresses from which arose "a sickening stench."
At first the prisoners were reluctant to speak to the commissioners, obviously fearing retribution, as the newspaper reporter noted. On the second day of the investigation, more information surfaced, including ominous talk of torture and murder.
Prisoners said the worst superintendent at the Coal Hill mine was J.B. Scott, who loved nothing more than lashing a prisoner's naked back with a leather strap. One prisoner recalled one night in particular when Scott was drunk and whipped "about 75 men, hitting them on an average 50 licks .... The skin was broken on each man's back and the blood ran out on the floor."
Sometimes Scott forced the prisoners to fight each other, though they were undoubtedly exhausted from working 10 hours per day in the underground mines.
On another occasion Scott whipped a Black prisoner named Andrew Fry, administering 112 lashes in one night. The next morning he laid on another 96 lashes, and "within an hour the Negro was dead."
Other murdered convicts were recalled by name. When a local coroner exhumed the body of Mark Elder, a white convict, they found 34 "fearful gashes ... It was developed that Scott whipped him last fall, leaving the flesh bleeding and sore, the flies blew in, and it became poisoned."
Perhaps the most pathetic case was the story of Frank Tolbert, a Black convict who "ran off and hid in the mines about Christmas because he was whipped ..." For almost a week Tolbert eluded capture, but finally he was shot and killed. The prisoner cemetery contained over 70 graves, a majority of its occupants estimated to have been murdered.
It must be remembered that while elected officials were appalled by the inhumane treatment found at Coal Hill, they had known at least as early as 1881 of systemic problems within the state prison. In that year a legislative committee investigation disclosed a "dreadful mortality" of 20 percent among convicts in 1880.
The committee agreed they considered "the contract system cruel, barbarous and inhumane and totally at variance with the civilization of the age ..." Yet the committee admitted that "the present embarrassed financial condition of the state" prevented any recommendations for change.
Change did come, however, for Gov. Hughes was defeated in his bid for re-election, with the penal system being an issue. Even members of the General Assembly had to admit to the problems, and as historian Garland Bayliss has written, they "adopted some improvements but no basic change in the system."
The Legislature of 1893 appropriated $30,000 to embark on a system whereby prisoners would be employed in prison industries. However, this turned out to be a mere pittance -- and when the 1895 Legislature made no appropriations for the prison, the prisoners once again were leased to private bidders.
The state made halting progress toward abolishing the convict lease system over the next two decades, but it took the dramatic pardoning of 360 convicts by Gov. George W. Donaghey in 1912 to break the back of the lease system.
Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living near Glen Rose in rural Hot Spring County. Email him at [email protected]. An earlier version of this column was published Oct. 16, 2005.