Cleburne County museum is focused on history
HEBER SPRINGS — Mike Disfarmer, celebrated today for his starkly realistic photographs of Cleburne County residents, died alone in his studio here 60 years ago. Several days passed before his body was found.
Now Disfarmer’s gravesite in Heber Springs Cemetery is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. His portraits, taken over nearly a half-century, have been exhibited as far away as Europe. His original prints have sold for $10,000 and more. So it figures that one of the half-dozen galleries at Cleburne County Historical Society’s museum would focus on his life with its assorted eccentricities.
Information panels mounted with a portfolio of his photos record that he was born in either 1882 or 1884 as Mike Meyer on an Indiana farm, before moving with his family to Arkansas as a teenager. He never married, and lived with his widowed mother until her Heber Springs house was destroyed by a tornado in 1926.
He then built his own home and studio, where he charged 25 to 50 cents for portraits. Later he changed his last name from Meyer to Disfarmer (“Not a Farmer”). The switch is thought to have signified a quirky rejection of his rural upbringing. He was known to claim that he’d been deposited newborn on his parents’ doorstep by a tornado.
Disfarmer used glass-plate negatives long after they became obsolete. Two of them, now prized artifacts, can be seen at the museum. He was pretty much unknown outside Cleburne County until after his death, when about 3,000 of his negatives were found in his studio. Now his negatives and prints are pricey collectors’ items at galleries in New York and elsewhere.
A museum posting sums up Disfarmer’s posthumous stature: “As photography has come to be widely recognized as an art form, his portraits are said to be some of the most outstanding of the 20th century. Adding to the intrigue is his personal story. His photography skills were largely self-taught. And his personality contrasted greatly with the small rural town of Heber Springs.”
Heber Springs is no longer so small. Since the photographer’s death in 1959, the town’s population has grown from about 2,000
to a bit more than 7,000. That’s thanks in part to the creation of Greers Ferry Lake in 1963 and the recreational allures it provides.
In 2016, the Cleburne County museum moved from a century-old private home into the former Heber Springs Post Office, a much larger space built in 1937. One of a half-dozen galleries displays Mural of the Ozarks: From Timber to Agriculture, an evocative panorama painted in 1939 by H. Louis Freund.
A posting notes that Cleburne is the youngest of Arkansas’ 75 counties, having been established in 1883. That was two years after Max Frauenthal founded present-day Heber Springs, originally called Sugar Loaf Springs because of the supposedly curative mineral water that brought visitors here a century and more ago.
One exhibit replicates part of Blondie Beauty Shop, run a century ago by Clara Frauenthal, daughter-in-law of the town’s founder. It displays an antique curling machine
that could have passed as a prop in the movie Bride of Frankenstein. A sign explains that “the hair was rolled on rollers, moistened with a chemical. Then electrically heated clamps (120 volts) were put on the rolls to apply heat to ‘set’ the ‘permanent wave.’”
Other displays deal with such disparate topics as the area’s musical heritage, the building of Greers Ferry Dam, the railroad era’s impact locally and the county’s military veterans from a number of wars. Available for viewing on request are five videos, most notably a 52-minute presentation titled Disfarmer: A Portrait of America.
Cleburne County Historical Society’s museum, 102 S. Main St., Heber Springs, is open 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Admission is free, with donations welcome. Visit cleburnehistory. info or call (501) 362-5225.