Are We There Yet?

Prescott museum includes unique bicycle display

On display at Nevada County Depot and Museum in Prescott is an antique bicycle featured in 1933 in “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”
On display at Nevada County Depot and Museum in Prescott is an antique bicycle featured in 1933 in “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”

PRESCOTT -- In the 1890s, bicycles were all the rage in Arkansas and around the nation. In the last decade before the Automobile Age began revving up, two-wheel pedaling had become a national pastime.

That's the backstory behind a homely object displayed at Nevada County Depot and Museum in Prescott, 95 miles southwest of Little Rock. It's an antique bike built around the end of the 19th century by Karl King, partner in a local blacksmith shop. What's notable is not its plain utilitarian design, but rather the fact that it showed up decades later in the popular "Ripley's Believe It or Not" newspaper feature.

A museum posting about the bike notes wryly that "the old two-wheeler looks as if it carried its last rider long ago and luckily found its way to the museum just before someone consigned it to that last great bicycle resting place, the scrap metal yard."

King eventually turned his creation into a bicycle built for three to give rides to his young granddaughters, Kay Stark and Genevieve Jones, who donated it to the museum long after his death. Visitors are asked to note "the basket in front of the main seat and the foot rests just below the goose-neck. The seat in front of the handlebars even has a seat belt." King was evidently a careful grandpa as well as bike builder.

When the bicycle appeared as a "Ripley's" item in 1933, in the Arkansas Gazette and other newspapers around the world, an embarrassing error slipped into the statewide paper's caption. The text identified the owner as "Karl King, of Prescott, Kansas." The Gazette ran a correction the next day, assuring readers that he was in fact an Arkansan.

As with some other local museums across the state, Nevada County's is housed in a former train station. The erstwhile Iron Mountain Railroad, by then part of the Missouri Pacific Railroad, made its last passenger run to Prescott in 1972. The city bought the terminal two years later for $1. Thanks to hard work by local volunteers as well as grants from state agencies, the depot eventually was restored to its 1940s look.

The potpourri of exhibits includes several pieces of so-called Outsider art by a local version of the legendary Grandma Moses, who began her artistic career late in life. The artist is Spot Daniel, a Prescott native who only started painting in 1987 when he was 66 years old.

On display is a colorful Daniel image of a train with passengers looking out the windows behind a chugging steam locomotive, as well as one of the estimated 800 red Arkansas Razorback mascots he painted over the years. The works are marked with his distinctive signature: a capital "D" with a dot in the middle.

Museum exhibits recount three Civil War engagements in Nevada County during the Union Army's Camden Expedition, part of the Red River Campaign in the spring of 1864. Fought in mid-April at Elkins Ferry, Prairie D'Ane and Moscow, they resulted in fewer than 200 casualties. They were preludes to heavier fighting elsewhere in which Confederate troops forced the North back to Little Rock.

A memorial placed by the American Legion outside the former depot honors soldiers from both sides who did battle at Prairie D'Ane. It includes two tombstones moved from a cemetery elsewhere in the county.

Inside the museum, a posting reports that progress is well underway to raise the $1.4 million needed to buy the 808 acres of the Prairie D'Ane site along Interstate 30. The success of that effort would eventually add another historic site to Arkansas' repertoire of visitor attractions.

Nevada County Depot & Museum, 403 W. First St. South, Prescott, is open 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday. Admission is free, with donations welcome. For details, visit depotmuseum.org or call (870) 887-5821.

Weekend on 11/16/2017

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