I have been spending some time in Grant County lately. As a relatively new resident of Hot Spring County, I am making excursions into neighboring towns and counties--getting to know the Gulf Coastal Plain as this part of south-central and southwest Arkansas is known. Many people call it "the piney woods" due to its vast pine forests.
My latest foray to Grant County was to visit the impressive American Legion B-17 Veterans Memorial. Some of my luncheon buddies in Benton were speaking in glowing terms about this memorial to nine U.S. airmen killed near Sheridan when their training plane crashed on the afternoon of March 12, 1943. The centerpiece of the memorial is a full-scale replica of a B-17F Flying Fortress. Visitors can walk around the plane on sidewalks.
The memorial project got its start when a Benton Boy Scout named Jerry Glen Jackson stumbled upon the overgrown and swampy crash site and a small 4-foot-tall memorial erected one year after the crash. The nine airmen killed in the crash were little more than Boy Scouts themselves, the oldest being 26-year-old Arthur N. "Jitterbug" Potter. Tragically, young Jackson was killed in a car wreck in 1986, but veterans' groups and individuals stepped in to finish the project. Located on Grant County Road 51, the memorial is easily accessible off Highway 35.
The memorial site, which is in a seasonally flooded forest, is a good introduction to the geography of Grant County. Early surveyors of the region complained of the impenetrable forests: "Nature intended this country for a cypress swamp on a grand scale, but after having furnished the ground plat, she [Mother Nature] had no cypress knees on hand, so concluded to stick it full of green briars and brush of various kinds instead."
The area is home to numerous waterways--such as the Saline River and Hurricane Creek--and thus suffered from periodic flooding. However, good farmland attracted numerous settlers starting in the 1840s.
One of the fiercest battles of the Civil War occurred at Jenkins' Ferry on the Saline River near the modern town of Leola as Union Gen. Frederick Steele evacuated south Arkansas following the disastrous Red River Campaign in the spring of 1864.
Created in 1869 with lands taken from Hot Spring, Saline, and Jefferson counties, Grant County was one of the later counties established in Arkansas. Created during Reconstruction, the county was named for President U.S. Grant, and Sheridan, the county seat, was named in honor of another Union Army commander, General Philip Sheridan.
Interestingly, some Reconstruction-era counties named for Unionists and Republicans--such as Clayton and Dorsey--changed their names after Reconstruction ended in 1874, but efforts to do the same for Grant County (and Sheridan) failed.
Since its founding, Grant County has had four courthouses, all located on the same site in Sheridan. The current courthouse was built in 1964.
Farming and logging have been the mainstays of the Grant County economy. A cooperage business headquartered in Maine, J.H. Hamlen & Son, began operations in the area in the 1880s. The lumber companies eventually built railroads to transport their products, with depots situated in Poyen, Leola, Belfast, Fenter, Prague, and Sheridan. The community of Poyen was named by the president of Hamlen & Son in honor of an ancestor, Joseph Rochemont de Poyen, who fled the French Revolution in 1792 and settled in Maine.
The timber industry still reigns supreme in Grant County. A local Sheridan festival, Timberfest, is held yearly in October to honor the logging heritage.
Probably the most famous names of Grant County are the late Witt and Jack Stephens, natives of Prattsville, who made fortunes in the natural gas business and as the founders of the country's largest off-Wall Street investment firm. John L. McClellan, Arkansas' longest serving U.S. senator, grew up in Grant County.
If you visit Sheridan, be sure to take a look at the Grant County Museum. Founded in 1963 by a local high school history teacher, Elwin Goolsby, the Grant County Museum was voted the 2002 museum of the year by the Arkansas Museums Association. Goolsby also wrote a 500-page history of the county in 1984, Our Timberland Home.
Visitors to the county would be wise to pay a visit to the Whippet in Prattsville, a small diner known far and wide for its catfish dinners.
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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.
Editorial on 07/17/2016