Jacksonville man a history resource
With family roots that ran deep in Jacksonville’s history, Tommy Dupree worked professionally as a real estate developer to help to build his city and as a tireless volunteer to preserve and promote the city’s and the state’s history.
“He was a go-to person for things that happened in Jacksonville and had personal knowledge of some of the events and people who were involved,” Warren Dupree, a nephew, said Thursday. “Either as a child or as a young man or as a businessman, he was around a lot of the people who made things happen around Jacksonville.”
Tommy Dupree died Tuesday from complications from cancer, his nephew said. He was 80.
Dupree’s family settled during the 1880s in the area that would become Jacksonville, acquired multiple pieces of land and donated land for public uses. An elementary school, a city park and a lake in Jacksonville each carry the Dupree name.
“All of his family have been instrumental in the history of and the growth of the city forever,” said lifelong friend Mike Wilson, a former state representative from Jacksonville. “Tommy was very knowledgeable about local history. Like some of the rest of us, he grew up here and he knew everybody and everybody’s mother and daddy and cousins.”
As a real estate developer, Tommy Dupree developed the city’s North Lake and Indian Head residential subdivisions and in 1965 built some of the first apartment blocks around what is now the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, according to a July 27, 2008, article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Dupree volunteered in his community through the Jacksonville Sertoma Club, the Keep Jacksonville Beautiful Committee and was an early board member of the Jacksonville Museum of Military History.
His love and knowledge of local history also led him to become president of the Reed’s Bridge Battlefield Preservation Society to oversee acquisition, preservation and development of acreage for the Civil War 1863 battle site off Arkansas 161. He eventually was appointed chairman of the Arkansas Civil War Sesquicentennial Committee for seven years leading up to and during the 150th anniversary of the war.
“That was kind of central to what he did over the last several years,” Warren Dupree said of his uncle’s Reed’s Bridge Battlefield efforts. “He and Mike Wilson were instrumental in the Reed’s Bridge operation and took that from just essentially as an idea and a concept to a significant, preserved battlefield area. He got help from Mark Christ and others to get national financing from the Civil War Trust and others. They got the battlefield preservation program in place and expanded it to what it is today.”
Christ, spokesman for the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, served with Dupree on the Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission. They first met in 1997, Christ said, when Dupree’s Reed’s Bridge group received a subgrant from a larger grant Christ had acquired for interpretation signs for Civil War sites in the state that didn’t have any. Dupree’s group acquired 10 acres of the battlefield site and created a roadside park from part of the vast battlefield.
“It’s an actual driving tour you can go on and follow all the action that took place in that battle,” Christ said. “He always went above and beyond.”
DannaKay Duggar, director of the Jacksonville Museum of Military History, recalled Dupree’s “personal knowledge of how the [Reed’s Bridge] battle occurred, what led up to the battle and how it started all the way up at what they call the grand prairie.”
“It was kind of a running battle,” she said. “He’d say, ‘Can you imagine battling the same people day-in and day-out, just moving the lines along?’ He was so full of knowledge I could only grasp. With him goes all that knowledge.”
Christ said he remembers Dupree as being “really a visionary.”
“He was always looking at the next step and was just a selfless devotee of Jacksonville,” Christ said. “He loved that town, and he was always looking forward to the future and saw a lot of the future of Jacksonville lying in its past. The Civil War history, the Trail of Tears went through Jacksonville, the Butterfield Stage Route that went through Jacksonville, then there was the World War II ordnance plant.
“He just saw the tremendous potential that Jacksonville had as a heritage tour destination in that wide variety of context,” he said. “Jacksonville really is the crossroads of some of the most significant parts of Arkansas history. His passing is a tremendous loss to Arkansas history.”