A lot in Scott

From Scott Plantation Settlement to Toltec Mounds, the unincorporated community has much to offer

This dogtrot log cabin is the oldest structure at the Scott Plantation Settlement in Scott near Little Rock. The cabin dates back nearly two centuries, but the design is timeless. The open “dogtrot” or breezeway in the middle offers a shaded spot and a bit of natural cooling.
This dogtrot log cabin is the oldest structure at the Scott Plantation Settlement in Scott near Little Rock. The cabin dates back nearly two centuries, but the design is timeless. The open “dogtrot” or breezeway in the middle offers a shaded spot and a bit of natural cooling.

SCOTT -- The most famous thing that happened on this soft ground was the Civil War skirmish of Ashley's Mills in 1863. The Confederates fell back, and the Union army went on to capture the state Capitol. But 10 miles might seem a long drive southeast of Little Rock just to read the marker.


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Yesterday’s Scott train depot is today’s visitors’ center at the Scott Plantation Settlement. The settlement is open for tours on Fridays and Saturdays through Nov. 18. The split-rail fence is a newer addition to the grounds.

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Farm tenants made do with sparely-furnished housing such as this at the Scott Plantation Settlement. Walls were plastered with newspaper and burlap for insulation, or at least to cover gaps between the wall boards.

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Ed Williams, president of the Scott Connections board of directors, expects to see this century-old sorghum mill in use again this fall at the Scott Plantation Settlement. The way it works: A mule is harnessed to the pole and walks slow circles, powering the mill in the center. The mill extracts juice from sorghum stalks, and the juice is boiled down to make syrup.

"Nobody famous was born here," Scott area resident Ed Williams says. "No movie stars come from here." The biggest news in Scott is the hubcap burger at Cotham's Mercantile. In fact, Scott's population of less than 100 is barely on the map. But that's exactly the point of Scott Plantation Settlement.

"It preserves everyday, mundane farm life," Williams says.

The museum is open for tours on Fridays and Saturdays from now through Nov. 18. Special events include the frontier-days celebration, Scott Connections Rendezvous, April 29.

The settlement's 24 historical buildings and a bell tower rest on eight flat acres out where nothing is louder than the mockingbirds. Exhibits date from Arkansas statehood, 1836, to around 1950. Williams oversees the property as president of the nine-member Scott Connections Inc., board of directors.

Williams, 66, is an education data specialist, drawn to the settlement by his family's farm background. His membership in the Early Arkansaw Reenactors Association is the kind of hobby that leads a man to ride a keelboat, the very keelboat on display at the settlement.

His volunteer job includes planting sorghum these warm days to be ready for harvest and milling in the fall -- the best way to demonstrate what an effort it was to make sorghum syrup.

Planning ahead, he is looking for a mule to power the mill that extracts green juice from the corn-like sorghum stalks. Boiled down to a thick, dark honey-colored syrup, sorghum is what people had for a sweetener before sugar beets, back when the kitchen stove burned wood.

Founded in 1995, the museum looks back to when Scott was surrounded by plantations: The Marlsgate Plantation, the Alexander, Protho, Armstrong, Lands End, more than a dozen.

These were big spreads, Williams says -- hundreds and thousands of acres bigger than the old definition of a family farm, 40 acres and a mule.

The pioneering Dortch family's oak-shaded Marlsgate mansion had stately elegance enough to have wowed Scarlett O'Hara. (And still does -- open for tours and weddings at marlsgate.com.) But they weren't all up to Scarlett's idea of a plantation, not judging by the settlement's restoration of a typical "big house," where the owners lived.

"It's not Tara," Williams says of the one-story frame home, hardly the magnificent image of Scarlett's white-columned showplace in Gone With the Wind.

The front door opens directly into the first of two bedrooms. High ceilings were the answer to summer's heat. The house displays luxuries that most people didn't have: indoor plumbing, a bathtub, electric lights. But the kitchen icebox is just that, a cabinet that held a chunk of ice.

Out back, the cook's quarters amounted to a tiny cottage of one room and a screened-in porch to accommodate a rocking chair, from which she could see that not everybody enjoyed such comfort.

Tenants lived in "pens," the word "pen" meaning a room: "two pen" for a house with two rooms, the walls covered with newspaper or burlap over gaps between the planks.

The park's oldest structure is a log house from 1830: a dogtrot house of two sides with a walkway in the middle, a gap that was meant to generate a little breeze.

Another design common to the time was the long and narrow shotgun shack with doors that opened front and back. One explanation for the term "shotgun" is that a blast of pellets could be fired straight through the house, as might have happened, and houses of this type were the symbols of a poor lot.

But the settlement shows how people made the best of a hard life in simple ways:

• No piece of furniture was more important than the kitchen table near the stove. The better-than-average stove had a tank that kept hot water. Food shelves were edged with buckskin-like fringes made of newspaper to ward off bugs.

• Houses were built off the ground, set on concrete blocks as another means of pest control. Chickens ate termites under the house. For something to see, just look down. Cracks between the floorboards made a show of what the chickens found to peck.

• The self-contained plantation had a general store called the commissary. The Scott Plantation Settlement's commissary is stocked with movie prop canned peaches and real-looking but fake hams and sausages left over from the filming of The Last Ride (2011), a movie about Hank Williams.

"I owe my soul to the company store," Ed Williams quotes Tennessee Ernie Ford's song, "16 Tons." The reference is to the tenant farmer's plight of endless debt to the commissary. But it wasn't all hardtack.

The commissary provided a wood-burning stove to sit around, and a table set for a game of checkers. It sold candy and dolls, and the showcase held sparkly Depression glassware.

In the back, the little post office appears to be brimming with who-knows-what packages wrapped with brown paper and string.

RIVER, STAY 'WAY

FROM MY DOOR

Scott is an unincorporated community on the line between Pulaski and Lonoke counties. Nature has been rough on the area, inflicting floods and droughts that changed the course of the Arkansas River, as described by the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture.

Bearskin Lake, Horseshoe Lake and Willow Beach Lake are left-behind, oxbow segments of the river. And as the river changed course, it revealed some of the state's richest farmland -- a treasure apparent to the earliest settlers, including the community's namesake, John Scott.

Cotton commerce built the plantations, but soybeans and other crops were soon to follow. The Scott Plantation Settlement reflects the area's agriculture in general.

Scott Connections Inc., is a nonprofit citizens group of about 80 members, founded in 1995, and the settlement is on land donated by Virginia Alexander from the Illallee Plantation of 1898.

The buildings all came from the Scott area, moved and restored thanks to grants and donations, Williams says. The structures include:

• The church with a pump organ that needs some work on the bellows to play again, and old stained-glass windows. The glass came from a country church that was proud to have it, although it shows that not all of yesterday's stained glass depicted Bible scenes fit for a cathedral. These two panes cast a purple tint over the pews. Plans call for holding services.

• The working blacksmith's shop equipped with vintage tools. Like the schoolhouse and the clinic, the blacksmith's anvil was essential to the plantation that had everything.

• The Scott train depot, now the settlement's gift shop and visitors center -- the place to pick up a map of the grounds in order not to miss the smokehouse, corn crib, ice house, rusted assortment of antique farm equipment and gotta-have-it outhouse.

CLOSER THAN YOU THINK

The settlement is focused on farm life as it was before gas- and electric-powered machinery. But history is not so far removed as it might appear. People still work on farms for pay and a place to live.

Ramshackle as some of these tenant houses might appear, "people were still living in them up to the 1980s, 1990s," Williams says.

A tour of the settlement answers such questions as what people did for music (made their own), and how they picked up a heavy block of ice for the kitchen in the big house (with ice tongs). And how they felt at the end of the day (so tired that a tight cot and a thin blanket looked good).

For all the questions it answers, the settlement asks one as well: Could a person from now stand these old-time conditions? Maybe even be glad to go back?

Williams knows: He'll be back to boil the sorghum.

Style on 03/19/2017

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