Parkin’s Black history remembered at state park
PARKIN — Visitors who go to Parkin Archeological State Park for its showcase displays of a prehistoric American Indian community can also view a way of life that vanished much more recently.
The park’s restored one-room Northern Ohio School dates back to the Jim Crow era, which prevailed in Arkansas for most of a century as strict racial segregation was enforced by law and practiced across the South.
Jim Crow explains why Northern Ohio School taught only Black students while operating from about 1910 to 1948. It served the community known as Sawdust Hill, a company town run by Northern Ohio Cooperage and Lumber Company in the period when Arkansas’ native forests were being widely felled.
Black schools were most often inferior to those serving white children. But a tour of Northern Ohio School suggests that Black teachers and students made the most of their educational challenges.
The structure’s survival is owed to a discovery described on one of a half-dozen signs outside. After the school’s closing in 1948, a local family bought the building. More rooms plus a carport were added to convert it to a residence while concealing the original school.
Having bought the property in the 1990s, the Arkansas Parks Department planned to demolish the old house. Then the school was found inside the additions, inspiring the restoration completed in 2006. Evidence of attention to detail can be seen on a wall outdoors, where student graffiti from many decades ago have been preserved.
Inside, visitors see the classroom as it might have appeared on a typical school day between 1936 and 1948. The teacher’s desk sits at the head of the class below the big blackboard flanked by Arkansas and 48-star American flags.
Facing the desk are eight tables and benches with room for five students each. Two wood-burning stoves are on display, along with lunch pails and other objects. A paddle indicates that corporal punishment was still part of the curriculum in the first half of the 20th century. A dunce cap suggests that poor students might have been mocked.
Outside, a sign observes that “rural education in the Delta was no easy task for students or teachers. There were many obstacles to overcome, such as weather, walking distances and family responsibilities. Plus, being an African-American school, students and teachers
were often given used, worn and substandard equipment. This made getting an education and graduating difficult.”
Another sign reports that daily lessons “revolved around the ‘three R’s’: reading, writing and arithmetic.” Class took place from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. “except in September and October. During those two months, students spent the morning picking cotton in the fields owned by Northern Cooperage and Lumber before they went to school.”
The restored schoolhouse sits just off the park’s threequarter-mile paved Village Trail, which skirts the St. Francis River in the Delta’s Cross County. Part of the walkway runs parallel to a moat probably dug by residents of the settlement called Casqui sometime between the 11th and 16th centuries to defend against warring neighbors.
Casqui is believed to have been the village visited in the summer of 1541 by Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto. The members of his ill-starred expedition were the first Europeans to set foot within the boundaries of present-day Arkansas.
The park’s visitor center displays an array of prehistoric objects excavated since the 1960s by the Arkansas Archeological Survey, a unit of the University of Arkansas. Among eye-catching items is a quiver made from bobcat skin and lined with a hollowed-out tree branch to hold the arrows.
Another artifact suggests that some Casqui residents may have enjoyed a sense of humor. A clay pot is decorated with two figures perched on the rim across from each other. The caption says the tableau may show “a hunter gazing wistfully across at a rascally rabbit. A potter may have been poking fun at an unsuccessful hunter.”