The Arkansas history community lost several members to death during the past year. Preserving our history--and telling its stories--falls mostly on the shoulders of a relatively small number of people, so deaths among our ranks can leave major voids.
Stephen J. Chism, a librarian and student of the history of spiritualism in Arkansas, died Jan. 21, 2018. I came to know Steve while I was head of special collections at the University of Arkansas Libraries in Fayetteville where Steve was a skilled reference librarian. He grew up in Fayetteville, where he occasionally heard references to a family of turn-of-the-century spiritualists. He never lost interest in that family--the Stringfellows.
Following years of research, in 2005 Steve published a book on the Stringfellow family, explaining how the bereaved Alice and Henry Stringfellow communicated with their long-dead son. The Afterlife of Leslie Stringfellow: A Nineteenth-Century Southern Family's Experiences with Spiritualism reminds us that the desire to communicate with the dead has a long history. Among the book's interesting treats are letters exchanged between the Stringfellow family and spiritualism's most popular adherent, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in England.
Stephen Chism is survived by his wife, Andrea Cantrell. Andrea contributed to Arkansas history too. Before her retirement several years ago, Andrea was a librarian and archivist in the UA Special Collections Department. There she and colleague Elizabeth McKee developed a detailed index to the published literature on Arkansas, now known as Index Arkansas, which is available online. Index Arkansas has become a vital tool in Arkansas history research.
Another Fayetteville history enthusiast, Donald E. Schaefer, died at the age of 85 not long after Steve Chism, on Feb. 15, 2018. Among Don's many contributions to state and local history was his service as editor of Flashback, the award-winning quarterly journal of the Washington County Historical Society and the oldest county history magazine in the state.
Roman Catholic monk Father Hugh Assenmacher, OSB, author of a highly regarded history of Subiaco Abbey in Logan County, died July 24, 2018. During his more than 40 years at the Abbey, Father Hugh taught history to legions of boys at Subiaco Academy. He had special interests in history of the American Civil War as well as the western frontier. In 1977, Father Hugh published A Place Called Subiaco: A History of Benedictine Monks in Arkansas, a 486-page chronicle based on deep and sustained research.
Founding Subiaco involved a trinity of interested parties: Roman Catholic Bishop of Little Rock Edward Fitzgerald; the Benedictine abbot at St. Meinrad's Abbey in southern Indiana, and the Little Rock & Fort Smith Railroad. Bishop Fitzgerald wanted to increase his small flock in a heavily Protestant diocese, which fitted neatly with the efforts of Col. William Slack, the railroad company land agent. The LR&FS Railroad, like most railroad companies, was land rich, having been given 6,400 acres of public land per mile of track laid. The abbot at St. Meinrad's, Martin Marty, felt a need to extend the work of his order into the western frontier, and Arkansas still fit that description in the 1870s.
Here's how Father Hugh described the purpose of his book: "It was into the valley of the Arkansas, stretching from Little Rock to Fort Smith, that the German immigrants of the 1870s and 1880s came. It was here that the Catholic Church followed them. That Church in Logan County was personified by the Swiss Benedictine monks who founded St. Benedict's Priory and built it into New Subiaco Abbey in a generation. How it was affected by the German Catholic immigrants and native Americans who surrounded it, how it shaped the immigrants and how it became Arkansan and American itself is the purpose of this history."
The death of Bill Leach on Sept. 10, 2018, was a great loss to the history of White County and its county seat of Searcy. Bill came by his interest in local history through his parents, both of whom served as president of the White County Historical Society, as did Bill.
His funeral was held at Pioneer Village in Searcy. That was an especially appropriate setting because Bill was the backbone behind that collection of historical structures. Without dedicated local history activists like Bill Leach, our historical legacy would be lost in our headlong rush into the future.
The erudite but gentle George H. Thompson, emeritus professor of history at Hendrix College in Conway, died at the age of 95 on Oct. 20, 2018. A Little Rock native, George served in World War II as a staff sergeant in the Army. Like a number of Hendrix history professors before him, George had a doctorate in American history from Columbia University.
George contributed significantly to Arkansas history through his teaching and also by serving as a board member and later president of the Arkansas Historical Association. He also served as president and board member of the Faulkner County Historical Society and was the founding president of the Faulkner County Museum in Conway. In 1976 Kennikat Press published George's book Arkansas and Reconstruction: The Influence of Geography, Economics, and Personality. This is not a book for the lazy reader, but it is significant in that it is a relatively early re-appraisal of Reconstruction and its role in modernizing Arkansas.
Only a few days ago, on Christmas eve, Jamie C. Brandon of Fayetteville died at 47 after a short illness. Jamie, who had a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin, was the research station archaeologist at the University of Arkansas where he was also a popular teacher in the Anthropology Department.
Jamie's research interests were broad; his dissertation was on Van Winkle's Mill, a 19th-century mill site in eastern Benton County which dated back to antebellum days. Descended from a family of early Dutch settlers, Peter Van Winkle established a grist mill and sawmill about 1851. With the aid of his 18 slaves, Van Winkle built a mini-empire. He rebuilt that business following the destruction of the Civil War, providing lumber and materials for the emerging towns of Eureka Springs, Rogers, and Fayetteville. Van Winkle provided much of the lumber for the construction of Old Main at the newly established state university.
The location of Van Winkle's Mill is today a part of Hobbs State Park-Conservation Area east of Rogers. The popular Van Winkle Trail introduces hikers and walkers to the site of Van Winkle's home and businesses. It's a good opportunity to contemplate the contributions Jamie Brandon made to Arkansas history and prehistory, and how much we lost by his early demise.
Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living near Glen Rose in rural Hot Spring County. Email him at Arktopia.td@gmail.com.
Editorial on 01/06/2019