Photos would tell NLR’s story in book planned by S.C. firm

LITTLE ROCK — A photographic history of North Little Rock’s colorful past is close to being put into book form by a South Carolina publishing company.

The North Little Rock History Commission has been asked to supply mostly unpublished photos of the city from the time it was the Eighth Ward of Little Rock in the 1890s to when it broke away to become an independent city in 1904, early on as Argenta and then as North Little Rock from 1917 to the present.

A resolution asking the City Council to bless the arrangement with Arcadia Publishing Inc. of Mount Pleasant, S.C., comes today.

The company has done previous photo histories on other Arkansas cities, including Little Rock, Jacksonville, Conway and Hot Springs, that are available in bookstores.

“It’s one of their ‘images of America’ that they do,” said Sandra Taylor-Smith, director of the History Commission. “They sought us out. They’ll do the publishing and the marketing. All it costs the city is our time.”

The History Commission has maybe 2,000 photographs, assistant historian Cary Bradburn said, from which it can choose and write accurate captions to define the city’s past.

Arcadia will publish them in a paperback collection of about 130 pages, Taylor-Smith said.

“We want to try to have as many photos that have not yet been published to get published here,” said Bradburn, author of a city history titled On the Opposite Shore: The Making of North Little Rock.

With the city’s centennial observance having been in 2004, and Bradburn’s historical account coming late that same year, some of the best photographs from the city’s past have already been published in recent years. But those aren’t ones that could easily be left out of a new history either.

Hanging in the History Commission’s offices, for example, is a large reproduction of an oft-published photo of dozens of Rock Island Railroad shop workers standing on and around a locomotive near the turn of the century.

Railroads, still the largest private employer in the city, are vital to the city’s history.

“It’ll be hard to leave that one out,” Bradburn said.

Taylor-Smith agreed such defining photos may need to be included, even if published before.

“I think we’ll have a lot of leeway on this,” she said. “We’re going to try really hard to use ones that we haven’t used already. But it’ll be difficult to do that completely and still tell the story.”

Photographs and information are due to the publisher by August next year, with the books ready for sale in time for the 2011 Christmas season, Taylor-Smith said. North Little Rock: A Pictorial History, printed locally in the 1990s, she added, is still popular.

“We still get calls wanting to know where to buy that,” she said. “It’s a great reference source. I think this book is going to do really well.”