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Higher education in Tulip

While searching recently for an elusive item in an 1854 issue of the Arkansas Gazette, I came across a report that the prominent Whig leader and raconteur Albert Pike had given the commencement address at two educational institutions in the tiny settlement of Tulip, Ark. For anyone who knows the modern Dallas County crossroads community, it is amazing that such a place was ever home to two leading educational institutions.

Tulip, located on a slight ridge in the pine expanses of south Arkansas, was settled in 1833 when the area was still part of Clark County. Like so many of the pioneering settlements in territorial Arkansas, Tulip was settled by a North Carolinian by way of Tennessee, Tyra Harris Brown. A few years later came Col. Maurice Smith, the forerunner of a whole clan of Smith settlers. A different Smith family, this one headed by Nathaniel G. Smith of Hardeman County, Tenn., also settled in Tulip. All the Smiths were families of wealth and culture, which boded well for their new settlement.

Perhaps it was this early growth and prominence which spawned a popular belief that Tulip was once considered as a possible state capital. However, I know of no evidence to this effect.

Tulip does not seem to have gone through an unruly adolescence. The village, which was situated near a military road, soon was home to Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches. In particular, the Methodists had a thriving congregation, which was for a time headed by renowned Rev. Andrew Hunter.

In 1849 George D. Alexander, a 24-year-old graduate of Washington College in Virginia, convened a meeting in Tulip to consider establishing an educational institution. The resulting Alexander Institute began as a coed school, but it was divided into two different institutions after only one year, forming the Arkansas Military Institute and the Tulip Female Collegiate Seminary.

The cadets at the Military Institute faced a rigorous course of instruction, including classes in the ancient languages (French was also available, but it cost more), surveying, engineering, mathematics, military tactics, chemistry, and other sciences. The female students at the Seminary received instruction in a variety of subjects, but the emphasis was on English and music. Since it was expected they would eventually marry, female students were expected to learn various domestic arts, such as needlework.

Keep in mind that Arkansas had no public school system prior to Reconstruction, so schools such as the Military Institute and the Female Collegiate Seminary charged fees of various kinds. During their early years, room and board was $10 per month. On top of that were fees for individual courses of study. A female student, for example, could receive a full 22-week teacher-training course for $16, but the English course was $20. Not many families in antebellum Arkansas could afford to send their children to Tulip for study.

The Female Collegiate Seminary was sold to the Ouachita Conference of the Methodist Church in 1858, after which it was known as the Ouachita Conference Female College. A Little Rock newspaper described the renamed school as "among the most prominent and popular schools . . . with a faculty that would do credit to any college in any state, with a good library, philosophical and chemical apparatus and other appliances."

The coming of the Civil War brought ruin to Tulip and its colleges. The cadets at the Military Institute enlisted en masse in the Confederate Army. Both schools lost their faculties and administrators. The Federal Army made a foray through the area during its ill-fated Red River Campaign of 1864. Families suffered some looting and destruction, but the Federal Army soon departed the area.

Tulip never recovered its pre-war prosperity and prominence. Neither the Military Institute nor the Female Collegiate Seminary reopened after the War. Today the settlement of Tulip hardly exists, but the cemetery remains.

This historical summary does not take into account the fact that much of the success of Tulip was due to the hard work of hundreds of enslaved people who labored in the fields, maintained the homes, staffed the kitchens, and kept the cotton gins humming. Records do not usually survive to tell the story of these men and women.

One of those black women was Jemima, a slave of Dr. Sanford Reamey. When in the spring of 1864 federal troops drew near Tulip, Dr. Reamey fled to Texas with his family and Jemima, who was pregnant with Reamey's child. When the extended family returned to Arkansas, Jemima was carrying a son named Scipio Africanus. After emancipation, Jemima married a former slave by the name of Jones--and they raised a son who became the premier black lawyer in Arkansas from the 1890s till his death in 1942.

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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 appeared June 11, 2006.

Editorial on 01/29/2017

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