LITTLE ROCK -- The Arkansas History Commission has about a half-million photographs. On Monday, it unveiled a mural featuring nine to commemorate the agency's 110th anniversary.
The mural, and the agency, state Rep. Warwick Sabin, D-Little Rock, said to a crowd of about 50 people, are "a testament ... to the value this state assigns to its history."
"Our state is blessed to have a rich and complicated history that nevertheless finds its way toward goodness and progress," he added.
Tim Schultz, supervisor of the imagery and preservation section, suggested the creation of the mural to Lisa Speer, the agency's director. It's in a hallway at the commission's offices in the Multi-Agency Complex, commonly known as the Big Mac building.
A committee of five people worked through more than 30,000 images, Speer said, to find those that represented all the different regions of Arkansas. "We didn't want it to be Little Rock-centric."
The nine photographs include:
• A mule car line at Hoxie and Walnut Ridge, Lawrence County, late 1890s.
• The steamboat President, docked at Osceola, Mississippi County, in the 1960s.
• Digging at the Crater of Diamonds, Pike County, 1920.
• A biplane in flight at Eberts Field, Lonoke County, 1918.
• A family overlooking the White River in Jackson County, undated.
• A baseball team at Grady, Lincoln County, circa 1930s.
• Peach picking at Siloam Springs, Benton County, circa 1900.
• Coal mining at Paris, Logan County, undated.
• Suffragettes at a rally at the state Capitol, 1918.
Ray Granade, immediate past chairman of the commission and director of library services at Ouachita Baptist University, said Alabama was the first state to create a historical agency, Mississippi was the second and Arkansas the third, in 1905.
Since the commission relocated to offices behind the Capitol, he said, 600,000 patrons have come in the door, "and that doesn't include people who write or email." The commission, he said, "has 36,000 square feet of stuff" -- manuscripts and books and photographs and relics.
Archival technician Adrienne Jones said about 13,000 photographs are now online.
Richard Davies, director of the state Department of Parks and Tourism, recalled the time in the 1970s when a state historian came to him with one of the treaties between the Quapaw tribe and the federal government.
"It's corners were chewed by mice," Davies said. "The secretary of state was going to throw it away."
The public can see the treaty now at the History Commission, he said.
Schultz previously worked for tourism division of Parks and Tourism, which created a mural in its offices a few years ago. He carried the idea to the History Commission. His favorite photograph of the nine is of the family on a bluff overlooking the White River.
"I enjoy the people in it," Schultz said. "The Mom over here is saying, "What are you doing?'"
Look closely at the Walnut Ridge and Hoxie mule trolley, Schultz said, especially the passenger hanging out a window with a half-eaten banana in his hand.
"I don't think any of the photos on this mural were the ones I suggested," Schultz said. "But that really doesn't matter. We wanted to show Arkansas."
"It's incredible to look back at the photos and fathom that's who we used to be," he said. "That's who we were."
Metro on 04/28/2015