As I drive north on Arkansas 9, I'm humming "Wolverton Mountain" and thinking about Marlin Hawkins, one of the most colorful politicians this state has ever produced. Hawkins was an elected official in Conway County for 38 years. Both the song and Hawkins have a connection to this place.
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas notes that Hawkins' "ability to deliver votes to statewide and national candidates gave him a profile in state politics that was rare for a county official. His political machine is an important part of Arkansas' political lore, and the effects of his political contacts are still evident in Conway County."
Hawkins was born in April 1913 near Center Ridge. His father was a sharecropper and part-time barber who died in 1929. Marlin Hawkins was the second of seven children and had to help support his family. He worked as a janitor and sharecropper until a family friend named Olen Fullerton encouraged him to enroll in a bookkeeping course at Harding College in Morrilton.
What's now Harding University at Searcy began as a senior college in 1924 when two junior colleges--Arkansas Christian College and Harper College--merged. They adopted the name Harding College and used the Arkansas Christian campus at Morrilton.
Harper had been founded in 1915 at Harper, Kan. Arkansas Christian had been chartered in 1919.
Harding was named in memory of James Harding, a co-founder and the first president of Nashville Bible School (now David Lipscomb University) in Tennessee. In 1934, Harding College moved to its present site in Searcy on the campus of what had been a women's institution known as Galloway College.
After taking the course, Hawkins became a bookkeeper for a Great Depression-era agency known as the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. In 1935, he became a Conway County Welfare Board caseworker as part of the federal Works Progress Administration. He would spend the rest of his career in government.
"By the age of 22, Hawkins knew the daily struggles that rural Arkansans faced in the Depression, as well as the importance of help from friends," the Encyclopedia of Arkansas notes. "Hawkins combined his energy, his rural roots and his new position on the Conway County Welfare Board to find jobs and government aid for the people in his district. He joked in his autobiography about turning his blind eye (he had lost it at the age of 8) to the livestock that belonged to some of the people he helped. The less he reported of a family's possessions, the more the family received in government assistance. Hawkins credits the gratitude of ... people he helped for his 1940 victory to his first elected office, Conway County circuit clerk and recorder."
Hawkins, a Democrat, later would serve as county treasurer and then as sheriff for 28 years. How powerful was Hawkins, who died in 1995 at age 82? Note that even though Republican Winthrop Rockefeller (who lived atop Petit Jean Mountain in Conway County) was elected governor in 1966 and re-elected in 1968, Rockefeller failed to carry Conway County either time.
White settlers began to arrive in this area in the 1830s. The first community was Lick Mountain, which was about four miles west of what's now Center Ridge. The most famous hill in the area, however, is Woolverton Mountain. A song of that name became a hit in 1962.
"Musicians Merle Kilgore and Claude King wrote the song 'Wolverton Mountain' (with King singing) about Kilgore's uncle Clifton Clowers, who lived on the northeastern part of Woolverton Mountain," writes historian Kenneth Barnes of the University of Central Arkansas. "For several weeks, the song topped the country charts and crossed over to pop charts. Other singers such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby recorded the song in the 1960s. While the song faded from the charts and Clifton Clowers died in 1994 at age 102, Woolverton Mountain remains a scenic backdrop for the western view from Center Ridge."
The song is spelled "Wolverton" and the mountain is spelled "Woolverton."
Clowers was born in October 1891 at Center Ridge. He was a World War I veteran, a deacon at Mountain View Baptist Church and lived most of his life on the farm. On his 100th birthday, King and Kilgore paid him a visit.
Kilgore, who was born in Oklahoma and raised in Shreveport, was later the manager for Hank Williams Jr. At age 14, Kilgore had carried the guitar for Hank Williams Sr. at Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport. King became friends with Kilgore and revised the original composition of the song.
Clowers would attend King's shows and ask people to call him Uncle Clifton. The song remained on the Billboard country chart for 26 weeks and was a Top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart. It sold more than a million copies.
Arkansas 9 wasn't paved until 1952, but Center Ridge had been a center of activity for decades after being founded by Frank Stobaugh and L.D. Jones in 1878. The community took its name from a post office that had been established in 1867 on a ridge. That post office closed after several years, but the post office that opened in 1879 at the Stobaugh-Jones settlement took the name Center Ridge.
"Center Ridge was the commercial center for the area's small farmers harvesting corn, cotton and timber," Barnes writes. "The drop in cotton prices during the Great Depression, combined with the drought of 1930-31, hit the community hard, and several residents moved to the Missouri Bootheel and Western states. By the 1940s, cotton had practically disappeared from the fields."
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Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 10/19/2019