It was an October Sunday dinner in 1832 when a number of new arrivals discovered that not all frontier Arkansans lived in log hovels and drank from gourds. On that autumn day 173 years ago Arkansas Territorial Governor John Pope and a party of 40 returning from the east were feted at a formal dinner at the Arkansas Post home of merchant and entrepreneur Frederick Notrebe.
Some of the diners were surprised to find their table covered in fine linens, their food served on good china, and wine poured into cut-glass goblets. By 1832 Arkansas was already known as a "bear state"--wherein lived men who were half-horse and half-alligator. While it cannot be denied that Arkansas lingered behind much of the country in economic and social attainment, it is quite surprising how quickly Arkansans have overcome economic adversity to take advantage of modern technology.
The steamboat, possibly the single most important technology to life and commerce in 19th-Century Arkansas, arrived with great rapidity. Robert Fulton and colleagues built the first commercial steamboat in America, the Clermont, in 1807. A mere 13 years later steamboats were nosing their way up the Arkansas River.
Photography came to frontier Arkansas with amazing rapidity. The French announced the invention of the "daguerreotype" process in 1839; the first professional photographer set up shop in Little Rock less than three years later in the spring of 1842. Within a few years itinerant photographers were hauling their heavy equipment into the deepest Ozark hollers as well as the refined drawing rooms of Delta planters.
While the telegraph was slow to make its way to Arkansas, telephone service came quite early. Alexander Graham Bell received his first patent for a telephone on March 7, 1876, and three days later he demonstrated its efficacy when he spoke the command, "Mr. Watson, come here; I want you." Western Union, the major telegraph company, refused to purchase Bell's invention, and a keen competition arose while the two companies slugged it out in court.
On Nov. 1, 1879, telephone service arrived in Little Rock with the opening of what some have claimed to be the third telephone exchange in the nation. While I could not verify that claim, it is amazing that a poor state like Arkansas had a telephone exchange within four years of its invention.
The arrival of incandescent electric street lighting in Little Rock came in 1888, less than a decade after Thomas A. Edison perfected the technology in 1879. Before that date Little Rock street lights were fueled with artificial gas, which required the services of a lamplighter who made the rounds at dusk each evening and fired up the lamps. Most Arkansas towns used electric street lighting by 1900.
Arkansans welcomed the automobile very soon after it went on the market. Henry Ford began the mass production of automobiles in 1903, and it did not take long before Arkansas country newspapers were boasting of local automobile traffic in headlines such as "Two Automobiles Pass Through Town on Sunday."
Auto ownership in Independence County in north central Arkansas is probably typical of the state. The 1910 tax assessments show not a single automobile in the county, but the following year several cars were assessed--mostly in the city of Batesville. Wealthy Batesville merchant Nathan Adler bought two cars, with the arrival of the second, a fancy Hudson model, being noted in the local paper.
Arkansans were caught up in the aviation mania that swept the nation in the aftermath of the Wright brothers maiden flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903. Within five years Arkansans were building airplanes of their own, but the first documented flight within the state was at Fort Smith. On May 21, 1910, J. C. "Bud" Mars flew his "aeroplane" around League Park, landing to a standing ovation from the large paying audience, which included residents of the county poor farm who were admitted free of charge. By the end of the following year practically every large Arkansas town had hosted landings, and Fort Smith received its first airmail service on Nov. 5, 1911. All of this took place in well under a decade after the flight of the Wright brothers!
One should not make too much of these facts. While Arkansans have traditionally accepted modern technological advances, and while affluent Arkansans have always been able to avail themselves of modern conveniences, this does not mean that the average citizen has had equal access. We had automobiles in Arkansas from a very early date, but the roads on which to drive them were not paved for another two or three generations.
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Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living near Glen Rose in Hot Spring County. Email him at Arktopia.td@gmail.com. An earlier version of this column was published Oct. 19, 2003.
Editorial on 09/27/2015