Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Fort Smith conference focuses on true grit of female pioneers
FORT SMITH — Men were not the only American pioneers who demonstrated true grit.
Stories of how women survived and even thrived in the harsh world of frontier Arkansas were explored in the day-long fifth annual Fort Smith History Conference on Saturday at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith.
“We felt it was time to have their stories told,” conference organizer Martha Siler told the audience of about 30 of the selection of this year’s conference theme.
In previous years, the conference, supported by the university’s History Department and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, covered African-American history, Native American history, Civil War history and, in the first year, the Clayton family history, Siler said.
It was the unsolved murder of John Clayton, U.S. District Judge Isaac Parker’s prosecutor, that sparked the conference, Siler told the audience.
Siler and conference cofounder Leita Spears were fascinated by Clayton’s unsolved murder and thought it could be the subject of a symposium. After that, she said, the conference became an annual event.
Peggy Lloyd, who delivered the keynote lecture this year on two Hempstead County pioneer women in the early 19th century, described herself and her love of history as “twisted.”
“As a teenager, while other girls were screaming over Elvis Presley, I liked to read old tax rolls,” she said.
Her passion for old court
house records led her to uncover the lives of otherwise anonymous Polly Vaughn, one of the first settlers of southwest Arkansas, and Dolly Pennington, a freed slave who later was able to buy her own daughter.
What is known of them has been gleaned from brief accounts in local histories or from the trails they left in census and courthouse records, Lloyd said. No photographs survive of them and there are no letters or diaries where they chronicled their feelings on issues of the day.
But their lives were remarkable, she said, in that they were able to survive the rugged life of a pioneer.
“It was, by my impression, a rough-and-tumble society,” Lloyd said. “Some of the people that were pushing the edge of the frontier were pretty tough folks.”
She said she thinks Vaughn and her husband Stephen poled a boat up the Ouachita and Little Missouri rivers from Louisiana about 1818 and settled near where U.S. 67 today crosses the Little Missouri River that forms the Hempstead and Clark county lines.
A boat launch near that spot the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission named Polly’s Landing is about 100 yards from where the Vaughns settled, Lloyd said.
The records show that Stephen Vaughn filed one of the first land patents in the area in 1823, Lloyd said. But the patent likely was filed by Polly Vaughn because her husband died two years earlier, probably from yellow fever, she said.
Lloyd said she thinks that after Vaughn died, neighbors may have tried to take advantage of the widow and take over the property, and that Polly Vaughn had to fight off the challenge.
Vaughn, who by then was remarried to a man named Field, slipped from view after that, Lloyd said. She probably died and was buried in an unmarked grave.
“This was a tough woman who worked hard and who survived in early Arkansas and was associated with one of the earliest settlers in the region,” Lloyd said.
Lloyd said census records stated that Pennington was born into slavery in North Carolina, was moved to Kentucky and from there her master, a man named Pennington, moved to Hempstead County. She was freed from slavery when Pennington died in the 1820s and lived and worked in Hempstead and Sevier counties until forced to leave the state in 1860. Pennington’s “is a remarkable story of a woman who operated in a difficult environment as best she could,” Lloyd said. According to records Lloyd found, Pennington earned money, probably working as a cook in a tavern or as a laundress, because she bought a lot in the Hempstead County town of Washington, where Lloyd lives today.
She also earned enough money to buy her daughter, Nancy, in 1834 for $500, Lloyd found in the records. Nancy remained her mother’s property until she bought herself from her in 1839. Other records show Pennington bought 80 acres of land in Sevier County that she and her daughter probably farmed until 1850 when they sold it to a neighbor.
They bought a 12.6-acre farm north of Washington in Hempstead County in 1852.
Pennington and her daughter kept the farm until the eve of the Civil War, Lloyd said, when the Arkansas Legislature voted that all freed slaves had to leave the state by Jan. 1, 1860, or be re-enslaved.
Pennington’s record ends there, but not that of her daughter. Nancy moved to Kansas, and Lloyd said she thinks Pennington died in Kansas or on her way there.