Arkansas’ keepers

They came from across the state on a rainy Friday night, packing the Grand Hall of the Clinton Center in downtown Little Rock for the annual awards banquet sponsored by the Historic Preservation Alliance of Arkansas.

It has been 33 years since Carl Miller Jr., Bobby Roberts, Kirby Smith, Parker Westbrook and Charles Witsell incorporated the HPAA as a nonprofit organization designed to protect this state’s architectural and cultural resources. The nascent preservation movement in Arkansas needed all the help it could get at the time.

Progress was slow initially in a place that had long ignored its history. But progress did eventually occur. In 1984, the Main Street Arkansas Program was established to help revitalize downtown business districts that were in decline across the state. Three years later, the HPAA played a leading role in getting legislation passed to establish the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council. The act dedicated money from the state’s real estate transfer tax to preservation and conservation purposes. In 2009, after failing in several previous legislative sessions, the alliance gained legislative approval of the Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit, which provides financial incentive to property owners while leveraging private investments in the rehabilitation of historic buildings.

Westbrook, who hails from Nashville in southwest Arkansas, was the HPAA’s first president. The Parker Westbrook Award for Lifetime Achievement is named for him. A number of past recipients of the award were in attendance at Friday’s banquet. The first honoree in 1981 was Susie Pryor of Camden, the mother of former U.S. Sen. David Pryor and the grandmother of current U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor. Both David and Mark Pryor were there Friday. David Pryor was awarded the Westbrook Award 15 years after his mother.

Susie Pryor, whose full name was Susan Hampton Newton Pryor, was the first woman to run for office in Arkansas after women obtained the right to vote. She also was among the first women in the state to serve on a school board. She was born in 1900 at Camden, where her father owned a shingle mill and served as the Ouachita County sheriff. Susie Pryor later attended a business school at Hot Springs and was appointed as the Ouachita County deputy circuit clerk in 1924. Two years later, she became the first woman to run for county office when she sought the circuit clerk’s job. She lost in a close race to a veteran who had lost an arm in World War I.

Susie Pryor was among the founders of the Ouachita County Historical Society and helped lead efforts to restore the Chidester House. She later bought another endangered structure, the Tuft House, and moved it to her property. Since 1985, the Arkansas Women’s History Institute has given the Susie Pryor Award for the best unpublished essay about Arkansas women.

“At age 60, she enrolled in a writing correspondence course, and when she died, she and a friend were working on a cookbook that her daughters later finished,” Janice Bufford Eddleman wrote in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. “Susie Pryor was involved in her son’s political campaigns, beginning in 1960 when he was a candidate for state representative from Ouachita County, and continuing through his campaign for his second term as U.S. senator. She was described by a friend as ‘a tough campaigner’ and was involved in many facets of the process, including making speeches, attending political rallies, putting up yard signs, answering telephones at headquarters, writing letters to the editor and going door to door.”

Susie Pryor died in February 1984, but I think she would have liked this year’s recipient of the Parker Westbrook Award, Frances “Missy” McSwain of Lonoke, HPAA’s executive director from 1987-93. During that period, she purchased her grandmother’s house at Lonoke, the 1885 Trimble-McCrary House. She’s the fifth generation of her family to have lived in the house. McSwain spent 10 years as the director of federal programs for the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program before being appointed in 2007 to head the state agency. She has been active in high-profile preservation efforts such as the Jacob Wolf House in Baxter County, the Lakeport Plantation in Chicot County and the Drennen-Scott House in Crawford County.

As for Parker Westbrook, he’s still going strong at age 88 and was at Friday’s banquet. During the decade I worked in the governor’s office, Westbrook often would call me about two things. The first was to complain that I used this newspaper’s style for the possessive case of the word Arkansas.That would be Arkansas’ in this newspaper. Westbrook led an effort to add a letter-Arkansas’s-and a resolution was passed by the Legislature in March 2007 requiring that the spelling be used in all official state documents.Westbrook, who was described at the time by the New York Times as “an authority on all things Arkansan, including its politics,” believed that the second silent “s” in the word required a third “s.” No legislator would challenge Westbrook, who served as an aide to a governor, two U.S. senators and two congressmen.

Westbrook also would call to complain about the name of Old Washington State Park. “It’s not Old Washington,” he would say. “It’s just Washington.” We finally got the name changed to Historic Washington State Park. Those historic preservationists are a tenacious lot.

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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the president of Arkansas’ Independent Colleges and Universities. He’s also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.