Calhoun County short on residents, long on historical impact

As documented by the 2020 U.S. Census, Calhoun County has the smallest population among Arkansas’ 75 counties. Located in the piney woods of south central Arkansas, Calhoun County, with Hampton as its county seat, has 5,113 residents. It was 75th in population in the 2010 census, coming in at 5,368. The county has been losing population for a full century; the high point was 1920 when it stood at 11,807.

My connection to Calhoun County has to do with food. Each summer my wife, Mary Frost Dillard, travels to Suzanne’s Fruit Farm near Hampton to pick tree-ripened peaches. The sandy loam produces a range of delicious fruits, berries and other garden treasures, but I’m partial to the peaches. Mary is an extraordinarily good cook, and her peach cobbler is my favorite summer comfort food, served with a generous topping of Yarnell’s Homestyle Vanilla ice cream.

Calhoun County was created in December 1850 with lands taken from Ouachita and Dallas counties. It was named for the recently deceased John C. Calhoun, a South Carolina political leader, vice president of the U.S. and a political theorist. His support for slavery as well as his belief in nullification — the notion that states could invalidate federal laws — played a major role in the drift toward secession and the Civil War. Hampton was named for State Sen. John R. Hampton, who played an important role in creating the county, bounded on the west by the Ouachita River and on the east by Moro Bayou.

Champagnolle Creek drains the central part of the county, which is situated in the Gulf Coastal Plain, the part of the state which was the last to emerge from the Gulf of Mexico. Its gently rolling hills are mostly covered with dense pine forests, and its river bottoms offer rich farmland. One of those rivers, the Ouachita, provided direct access to markets in New Orleans.

The Chidester-Reeside Stagecoach Co., headquartered in Camden, provided daily four-horse stage service from Washington in southwest Arkansas to Gaines’ Landing on the Mississippi River near modern Lake Village. In July 1858, the Chidester Co. advertised 48-hour service to Gaines’ Landing, with stops at Camden, Hampton, Warren and Monticello.

While exploitation of timber has always been important in Calhoun County, initially it was cotton cultivation which provided the economic backbone for the area. This entailed the use of an enslaved workforce; the 1860 census listed 981 slaves.

Some 400 white men from Calhoun County fought to defend slavery, forming companies with names such as the Yellow Jackets and the Invincibles. An estimated 40 residents joined the Union army. No Civil War battles were fought in the county.

Calhoun County received a huge boost in 1883 with the arrival of the Cotton Belt Railroad in the northern part. Soon, a sawmill town named Thornton grew up around the railroad tracks. The Stout Lumber Co., which owned 70,000 acres of pine forests in the area, built a huge sawmill and an 18-mile rail line to haul logs to its mill. James H. Stout, the mill owner, was unusual in his use of not only Black workers but also Mexican immigrants.

Perhaps it was James Stout’s Wisconsin upbringing which resulted in his use of Black workers. Certainly few local whites agreed with him, made clear by what was called at the time the Calhoun County race war. While few reliable accounts exist, the conflict apparently began in March 1892 when white vigilantes — known as white cappers or nightriders — whipped a Black woman for “insulting” a white woman. Rumors circulated promising Black retribution. [Afterthe-fact white newspapers reported that the insult came from “a colored man.”]

Nancy Snell Griffith, author of the entry on the conflict in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, used a cautionary approach in writing: “The main incidents of the race war spanned over a month, with the major events happening in the space of four or five days [in September 1892]. While accounts of what happened are contradictory, it is clear that the level of racial animus was high, and that at least a handful of the area’s African Americans lost their lives before it was over.”

The “war” did not actually end until three years later, in July 1895, when two Black brothers, Jim and Jack Ware, were taken from the jail in Hampton and lynched. Sheriff R.H. Cone did little to stop the mob and afterward rushed to Little Rock to placate Gov. James P. Clarke, who was incensed by the lynching and offered a $200 reward for the capture of each mob member.

The sheriff, in an interview with an Arkansas Gazette reporter, claimed: “A great deal of the feeling against the two Wares was attributable to the part they took in the race riots in Calhoun County three years ago.”

He concluded: “The Wares were leaders among the Negroes then and have all along been obnoxious to the whites.”

The new century found Calhoun growing steadily. In 1909, the county built a new courthouse. It’s one of the few Arkansas counties which has not suffered a courthouse fire, and records go back to the county’s founding. Designed by Little Rock architect Frank W. Gibb, the courthouse is conspicuous for its distinctive clock tower.

World War II had a profound impact on the county. In the autumn of 1944, the federal government took some 68,000 acres of land to build the Shumaker Naval Ammunition Depot. Declared surplus in 1961, the forested land was sold to International Paper Co., and most of the depot facilities were sold to Brown Engineering Corp.

Brown later changed its name to Highland Industrial Park. The Park, consisting of almost 16,000 acres and containing more than 1,000 buildings, is home to a large number of defense contractors.

In 1968, the Brown Foundation donated land and buildings for the new Southwest Technical Institute, later renamed Southern Arkansas University Tech. The state also located Arkansas Law Enforcement Training Academy, Arkansas Fire Training Academy, and Arkansas Environmental Training Academy in Highland Industrial Park.

Despite its small size, Calhoun County has produced some outsized people. John R. Steelman, born near Thornton in 1900, went on to serve in the White House under three presidents, including as the first presidential chief of staff. Better known, no doubt, is country songwriter Wood Newton.

Charles B. Pierce, who brought us such Arkansas-set films as “The Legend of Boggy Creek,” grew up in Hampton. Pierce’s next-door neighbor in Hampton, Harry Thomason, developed and produced a variety of successful television series such as “Designing Women.” His early 1990s CBS television show “Evening Shade” was the first network television series set in Arkansas.

Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist. Email him at Arktopia.td@ gmail.com.