Old Mike and the light
When I was growing up in Arkadelphia decades ago, a popular road trip for teenagers involved driving to Prescott to see Old Mike and then swinging back through Gurdon to check out the black cats atop the Hoo-Hoo monument. The final stop would result in a hike down some railroad tracks in hopes of seeing the Gurdon Light. It’s Halloween, an appropriate day to review these strange slices of life in southwest Arkansas.
Old Mike was the name given to a traveling salesman who died at Prescott in 1911, was embalmed and then was displayed for more than six decades.
“Mike visited Prescott about once a month to sell pens, paper and thread to homes and businesses near the railroad tracks in the center of town,” writes David Sesser of Henderson State University. “He would arrive on the southbound 3 p.m. train and stay overnight. The next day, he would reboard the 3 p.m. train and continue his journey. On April 11, 1911,
Mike probably attended an outdoor revival in the city park. The next day, his body was found underneath a tree in the park.”
He likely died of a heart attack. The salesman carried no identification.
The body was taken to the Cornish Funeral Home in Prescott. After being embalmed, it was placed on display in hopes that someone would identify it. The body of Old Mike became somewhat of an attraction in a town that had signs proclaiming “Prescott: The Hub of Vacationland.” In 1975, state officials requested that the body be buried. The burial occurred on May 12, 1975, at DeAnn Cemetery.
“It was just part of growing up here in Prescott,” Cherrie Wilson told KARK-TV several years ago. “It was like, you know, coming to see your relative.”
A few miles northeast of Prescott, the Hoo-Hoo monument is a landmark in downtown Gurdon. It was constructed in 1909. The bronze-andgranite monument, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999, was put up to honor the International Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo, a fraternal organization for lumbermen that began in Gurdon in 1892. Several men who had attended a meeting of the Southern Lumber Manufacturers Association at Camden found themselves stranded in Gurdon by a delayed train. They walked over to the Hotel Hall and began visiting with a local lumberman named Rudolph Strauss. One of those men was Bolling Arthur Johnson. By the time the train arrived, the Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo had been formed.
“Johnson, a lumber trade journalist, had for some time seen a need to link together, or ‘concatenate,’ the workers of the timber industry,” Mark Christ writes for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. “In 1891, there were many local and state associations for lumbermen in existence, but no national order had been established. In order to promote communications, foster cooperation and create a shared code of ethics for the lumber industry and its workers, Johnson aspired to create a fraternity of lumbermen. … The organization borrowed concepts from Egyptian lore for the titles, symbols and rituals of the new fraternity. A black cat with its tail curved into the number nine was chosen as the order’s emblem. The theme of ‘nine’ from the legendary number of cat’s lives carried through the organization in the number of jurisdictions, committee memberships, etc.”
Johnson and several other founding members were in Gurdon in 1909 to dedicate the monument. It was the work of a sculptor named George Zolnay, who was born in Hungary in 1863 and came to the United States in 1892. Zolnay studied at the Imperial Academy in Vienna, Austria, and the National Academy in Bucharest, Romania. A plaque cast from copper (from pennies donated by Hoo-Hoo members) was affixed to a building on the site of the Hotel Hall. With that building set for demolition in 1927, the plaque was moved to a spot adjacent to Gurdon’s depot and affixed to a granite base.
Christ writes that the plaque is “decorated with Egyptian Revival-influenced reliefs and engravings, as well as a small relief of the Hotel Hall. The names of all Hoo-Hoo presidents, or ‘Snarks of the Universe,’ were engraved on the opposite sides of the monument, and two statues of cats, as they appear on the Hoo-Hoo logo, were placed atop the new monument.”
After having checked out the cats atop the monument, it was time to find the Gurdon Light. The mysterious floating light near railroad tracks outside Gurdon was first reported during the 1930s. In December 1994, NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries featured the Gurdon Light, which often is tied to the 1931 murder of a man named William McClain.
Some people will tell you that the light is caused by reflections from traffic on nearby Interstate 30, but the Gurdon Light was spotted long before the interstate was constructed. Others say it’s caused by swamp gas. The story that’s most often told to those who visit the area is that a railroad worker fell into the path of a train and had his head severed. The light, you see, is from the lantern he uses to search for his head.
McClain, a railroad foreman, got into a December 1931 argument with an employee named Louis McBride. It was reported that McBride hit McClain on the head with a shovel and then beat him to death with a railroad spike hammer. The Gurdon Light was first sighted shortly after McClain’s death. A re-creation of the murder was filmed for Unsolved Mysteries. Old Mike might be buried these days, but you can bet that there will be people searching for the Gurdon Light on this Halloween evening.