After the flood

Pocahontas was in the news in early May for all the wrong reasons. Water from drenching rains that occurred in southern Missouri during the final weekend of April flowed south down the Current, Eleven Point, Spring, Little Black and Fourche rivers. Once the water came together, it was too much for aging Black River levees to handle. Thousands of acres were flooded in Randolph and Lawrence counties, along with dozens of homes and businesses.

Just a week prior to the worst of the rainstorms, dozens of history buffs—academics and amateur historians alike—gathered in Pocahontas for the 76th annual meeting of the Arkansas Historical Association. The AHA has a tradition of moving its annual meetings across the state, thus allowing county historical societies to show off local attractions. Almost 100 leading Arkansas scholars and other prominent citizens gathered on Feb. 22, 1941, at the Marion Hotel in downtown Little Rock to form the AHA. Unlike scholarly organizations in other fields, the AHA has had a strong representation from the start from those board member Maylon T. Rice of Fayetteville likes to call “civilians.” As an amateur Arkansas history aficionado, I’ve been attending AHA spring meetings for two decades. My wife likes to refer to it as my annual “history nerd weekend.”

Pocahontas just might have the most charming, vibrant downtown of any of the places the organization has met. Two luncheons and the annual awards dinner were held at the 1872 Randolph County Courthouse, which was replaced in 1940 by a courthouse constructed with help from the Works Progress Administration. The 1872 facility, which is in the center of the town square, has since been renovated and now serves as the home of the Randolph County Chamber of Commerce. An opening reception was held across the street at the Randolph County Heritage Museum, one of the best county museums in the state. Sessions at which various papers were presented were held at Marilyn’s Clogging Co. on the square along with the nearby Downtown Playhouse, which occupies a building constructed in 1941 to house the Imperial Theatre.

Marilyn’s has helped spur the revitalization of downtown Pocahontas by bringing regular crowds of children, their parents and other relatives to the square for dance classes and performances. The Downtown Playhouse brings in additional crowds for stage productions. The Imperial Theatre showed its first movie in the building soon before the U.S. entry into World War II in 1941. It was the first public building in Pocahontas to have air conditioning, the first to use glazed brick and the first with neon lights. There sometimes were live performances by well-known northeast Arkansas musicians such as Gary Gazaway and Robert Bowlin. The last movie was shown in the 1970s.

In 1994, a nonprofit organization known as Studio for the Arts purchased the building. The group, which was founded in 1987 by Andee Evers, renovated the structure and opened the Imperial Dinner Theatre in 1995. The live shows there proved so popular that a larger facility was built east of town in 2004 on Arkansas 304. Unfortunately, that area flooded in the spring of 2011 and again this year. During the first week of May, almost four feet of water flooded the building, which cost more than $2 million to build. Shane Cummings, the Imperial Dinner Theatre marketing director, told KAIT-TV in Jonesboro: “It could be next spring before everything is back to the way it was before. We were depressed for about two hours and then we said, ‘That’s enough of that. We’ve got to go find out what we have to do next.’”

In the original movie theater downtown, another group formed the Downtown Playhouse in 2014. In addition to having two dinner theaters, Pocahontas boasts the state’s oldest barbershop, the Sanitary Barbershop, which has been at the same location on North Marr Street on the town square since 1893. Meanwhile, there has been a drugstore at the corner of Bettis Street and Broadway on the square since 1852. The Futrell family has operated the pharmacy there since 1962, and it still has a soda fountain. Just down Bettis Street, a visit to Futrell’s Hardware is like stepping back into the 1940s.

An important addition to the downtown historic district is the Lesmeister Guesthouse, which opened in 2013 and provides upscale suites and vacation rental apartments. The business is named for Henry Lesmeister, a German immigrant who constructed the building in 1902. He moved to Pocahontas in 1880, and his son became an architect who designed notable buildings in Pocahontas, Jonesboro and Memphis. Local dentist and Pocahontas native Patrick Carroll purchased the building in 2011 and began restoration efforts. Across the street from the guesthouse, an Italian restaurant known as Bella Piazza also brings people downtown at night.

“The late 19th century through the mid-1920s marked a golden age for Pocahontas,” Gary Buxton writes in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. “Seven hotels graced Pocahontas from antebellum days until the mid-1920s. Forty- three steamboats navigated the Black River at the turn of the century, making Pocahontas a strategic port of commerce. … Early industries included four button factories, a brick company, Hanauer’s cotton gin, Grafton Stave & Heading Co. and Pocahontas Bending Works, which made wooden parts for wagon wheels.”

Recent years have been marked by a concerted effort to keep downtown viable. Luckily for those who operate businesses there, downtown sits high above the Black River and wasn’t adversely affected by this month’s flood.