ATTRACTIONS IN PINE BLUFF, AR
Vibrant Vistas: The Artful Murals of Pine Bluff
A refreshing short downtown walking or driving tour of the Murals of Downtown Pine Bluff offers an excellent opportunity for visitors to see this history of the area covering the past 200 years. The murals on the exterior walls of several of Pine Bluff’s downtown buildings are unique, exquisite, and educational.
Main Street 1888
(3rd & Main)
The first mural established in Pine Bluff, Main Street 1888, is an actual representation of how the street looked at that time and was drawn from an old photograph in the archives of the Jefferson County Historical Society.
The internationally known artist, Robert Dafford, painted the mural in the summer of 1992. He was dedicated to establishing the historic details of the photograph and it has proved to be a popular mural, probably the most popular in the series.
Tourists are often seen in front of the old street scene where they photograph the mural with friends and relatives in front of the image. A small park has been constructed around the mural known as the 3rd & Main Street Park.
Only one small detail was changed from the original photograph to the mural. In his quest for historical accuracy, Dafford encountered a roadblock. He wanted to show details of the mule drawn streetcars, but the one in the photograph was turning west on Barraque Street, in front of the Courthouse. At that position, the distance prevented good detail rendering. Since the streetcars turned at Second Avenue at a later date, the cars in the mural turn at that corner thereby giving Dafford the opportunity to show more details of the car.
Two leaders of the town at the time are highlighted in the foreground mural. The figure on the left is that of Judge J.W. Bocage, who recorded much of the history of Pine Bluff during the years 1840 through 1898. The figure on the right represents Wiley Jones, who became one of the leading businessmen of the community. One of his endeavors was the transit system servicing Pine Bluff at the time of the mural.
Saracen
(Barraque & Main)
There is a legend up and down the Arkansas River concerning one of the last of the Quapaw Indians when they lived in Jefferson County. His name was Saracen. In the years to follow, the legend grew regarding his rescue of two children who were stolen from their mother at Pine Bluff by a band of marauding Chickasaw Indians. Saracen promised the distraught mother to return the children and went in pursuit of the Chickasaws. Overtaking them downstream on the Arkansas River, Saracen waited until nightfall and when the Chickasaws were asleep, he broke the night's stillness with the Quapaw war cry. The frightened Chickasaws disappeared into the night, abandoning the children, Saracen gathered them up and returned them to their mother.
When the Quapaws moved to Oklahoma in 1833, Saracen did not go. His petition to remain was granted and he spent his final days on the banks of the Arkansas River. He is buried in St. Joseph's Catholic Cemetery where visitors often go just to see his tombstone.
When he died, he was buried in the Old Town Cemetery located behind the Methodist Church, then situated on the northwest corner of Fourth and Main. In 1888, the cemetery was moved and the grave of Saracen was brought to the attention of Father J.M. Lucey of St. Joseph's Catholic Church. Bishop Edward Fitzgerald, after getting a petition from Fathey Lucey, agreed to allow Saracen's remains to be reinterred in the Catholic Cemetery.
In the early 1880's, the Bureau of Ethnology wanted to dig up Saracen's body and send it to Washington, D.C. But the people of Pine Bluff refused to reveal to the Washington Bureaucrat where Saracen was buried. So, Saracen rests in peace with the townspeople who had regarded him highly.
UAPB Mural
(2nd & Main)
The second mural in the Pine Bluff series was the one dedicated to the education of African Americans, simply called The UAPB Mural.
The school began as Branch Normal in 1875 and has continued serving Pine Bluff and this area since that time. The first chancellor was Joseph Carter Corbin who served in that capacity until 1902. Corbin opened the school in a house located at Second and Oak Streets. Six years later the school moved into permanent quarters at Plum Street between Second and Fourth Avenues.
In 1927, the name of the school was changed to Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical, and Normal, or as Arkansas AM&N. It operated under this name until 1972 when the school was incorporated into the University of Arkansas system. What used to be known as Branch Normal is now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. Two of the men who greatly influenced UAPB were Corbin and Dr. Lawrence Davis, Jr. Corbin and Davis' images are to be found in the right panel, Corbin is in the oval design at the far right, while Davis is located on the bottom right of the extreme right panel.
One of the school presidents between Corbin and Davis was John B. Watson. His image is located in the top left of the mural. He assumed the leadership of AM&N in April 1928, moved the campus to its present location, and increased the student body significantly. There were only 36 students enrolled at the school in the year he took office. When Watson died in December 1942, AM&N had a total enrollment of 474 college student with another 501 students in the preparatory school. There were 66 faculty members and a physical plant valued at two million dollars.
The present campus was established on Highway 79 North and the school was accredited eight years after Watson's death.
Whether it was called Branch Normal, Arkansas AM&N, or the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, the school has influenced the community and surround area for many years.
The Movie Mural
(Between 2nd & 3rd Avenues on Main)
Michael Wojczuk of Colorado is the painter of this mural paying tribute to a couple of boyhood friends who grew up in Pine Bluff and left a lasting impression on the movies. The two were "Broncho Billy" Anderson, known in his Pine Bluff days as Max Aaronson, and Freeman Harrison Owens.
Aaronson left Pine Bluff first, going to New York where he became involved in the pioneer movies. He appeared in "The Great Train Robbery," the legendary movie that first presented a complete story on film. He worked steadily in film production, then moved to Chicago where he formed Essanay Studios. George K. Spoor and Gilbert Anderson (Aaronson's film name) established the production studio, one of the first. The word, Essanay, is a composite of Spoor and Anderson ... S&A which was spelled phonetically as Essanay. Between 1908 and 1915, Anderson made 375 westerns. The most famous of these were the "Broncho Billy" series.
Freeman Harrison Ownes became interested in movie photography. Before he left Pine Bluff he built his own movie camera. Interested in becoming a cameraman, Freeman contacted Anderson who brought him to Chicago as a fledgling photographer. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a war photographer during World War I. After the war, he traveled extensively on world assignments. But Owens became more interested in the technology of photographic equipment and held many patents for that equipment.
His most famous invention was denied him in a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. Owens perfected a sound on film technique which solved the early problems of combining sound and film. He worked on the system at home, but since he was also working for Lee DeForest, DeForest sued Owens for the rights to his invention. At first the courts sustained Owens as the rightful inventor, but the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the lower court's decision, and Owens lost the rights to his invention. He had little to say about DeForest for the remainder of his life.
The other images on the mural are people who were friends or influenced by Owens and Anderson. In pre-World War I days, Wallace Beery was a trim figured leading man, receiving top billing in his early movies. He and Owens became friends, carousing Chicago frequently. Freeman related the story of how he and Beery were out on the town one night when Chicago police began chasing Beery. But Beery would have no part of Chicago's finest. He speeded up and out-ran the police, scaring Owens mightily in the process.
Charlie Chaplin appears in the mural because he was imported from England by Anderson and worked for Anderson in his early days.
The young lady between Beery and Chaplin is a likeness of Peggy Shannon who grew up in Pine Bluff and migrated to Los Angeles where she appeared in a few movies, then faded from the scene.
The Timber Mural
(5th & Georgia Streets)
The Timber Mural is dedicated to a large industry in Pine Bluff and Jefferson County. The harvest of virgin timber brought wealth to many in the city and county. It began around 1885 and continued until the end of the 1920's when most stands of virgin hardwood timber had been harvested. But in the entwining years the industry was a large operation. John F. Rutherford is credited with the beginning of timber operation. In 1885 he organized the O.D. Peck Lumber Company, a mill that furnished facilities for small sawmills that were unable to afford dry kilns and planing services.
Later Rutherford built a sawmill and changed the name of the company to the Bluff City Lumber Company. There were other large lumber companies in the area ... Sawyer & Austin, J.L. Williams & Son, Peers-McGlone, and Long-Bell.
But it was Rutherford who dominated the field. He was often referred to as Arkansas' first millionaire ... a man of great ability to analyze and put together a dynasty. Besides the lumber company, that dynasty held over 100 pieces of property, the streetcar system, plus some 90 businesses and dwellings. His Kearney Lumber Company operated sawmills, log yards, a log pond, lumber yards, rail facilities, commissary, post office and houses that made up a sizeable town. The community was called Kearney and was located between Jefferson and Redfield. Little remains of the old Kearney community today.
One of the virgin forests was located near White Bluff, just north of Lock and Dam Five, and was one of the wildest areas in Arkansas. It contained one of the most densely populated wolf and bobcat areas in the state. Even bear and panthers lived in the area.
River Mural
(5th & Pine Street)
The Arkansas River was both friend and foe to the early settlers of what is now Jefferson County. In the beginning years it served as a highway for the pioneers. Both Europeans and Quapaw Indians paddled up and down its streams. The Frenchmen were the first to settle on the Arkansas. For a while they were situated on the north side of the river but flooding conditions made their life difficult. So, they paddled their canoes upriver to the pine bluffs and settled there. The village grew into Pine Bluff.
The River Mural is a composite of three early photos. Cotton bales were transported to the steamboat landings in wagons, loaded onto the boats and shipped to New Orleans. The left side and the right side of the mural depicts the positive side of the river. The center section is dedicated to the many floods that inundated Jefferson County. The flood photograph used for the mural was recorded in 1908. It displays Barraque Street from east to west with the courthouse visible at the upper right of the insert. The banks of the river were crumbling into Pine Bluff, threatening the town. On a dark night in December 1908, two massive explosions occurred in the upstream levee, causing the river to move away from Pine Bluff. The identity of those midnight dynamiters became a town secret, and their names were never exposed.
Today, flooding is rare due to dams and levees from the river's mouth up to Tulsa, Oklahoma. It still serves the delta with teaming barge traffic. The Arkansas River is a vital part of Pine Bluff's rich heritage.
The Arkansas Flag
(Chestnut & U.S. 65B)
Some confuse the Arkansas State flag as one of the flags associated with the old Confederate States of America. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Arkansas' state flag was designed and adopted in 1912-13, some 48 years after the Civil War. Its history is interesting. It began when the United States Navy launched one of its battleships and named it the USS Arkansas. Customarily, states were asked for state flags to be displayed on the battlewagon. But good heavens to Betsy, it was discovered that Arkansas did not have a state flag!
The Pine Bluff Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution decided to rectify the state's omission by designing a state flag. One of its members, Miss Willie Hocker, sketched out a design. A silk flag was made from the sketch and was unanimously adopted by the Arkansas Legislature on February 18, 1913. Miss Hocker lived in Dudley Lake Township near Wabbaseka and was a teacher in the Pine Bluff and county school systems for thirty-four years.
The flag itself is designed on a red field with 25 stars arranged in a diamond. There are 25 stars signifying that Arkansas was the 25th state admitted to the union in 1836. They are arranged in a diamond shape because Arkansas is the only state in the union in which diamonds will be found. There are four large stars in the center of the diamond with the word "Arkansas". The four stars represent the four governments that have ruled over the state territory. They are Spain, France, The Confederate States of America, and the United States of America.
Miss Hocker died at Wabbaseka on February 6, 1944.
The Delta Heritage
(2nd & Main)
The Delta Heritage Mural depicts the Arkansas River Delta between the years 1920 and 1940 and is interpretive rather than a reproduction of an actual photograph from Pine Bluff's past.
The main figure at the left of the mural is an image of John Rust, inventor of the mechanical cotton picker. The cotton picker behind him was drawn from an actual photograph and is the first successful, mechanical cotton picker. Rust's design was produced by all major manufacturers of farm equipment including Ben Pearson Manufacturing Co. of Pine Bluff. The mechanical cotton picker revolutionized life along the delta when the number of farm hands was greatly reduced due to mechanized harvesting.
Near Rust's jaw is a rendition of the old Free Bridge, now replaced by a ore modern structure across the Arkansas River. But in its heyday the old bridge was significant to delta society. There is an airplane on the horizon of the scene that commemorates one of the early cotton dusting flights, flown by J. Orval Dockery and Allan Scott of Pine Bluff.
Two things were at the center of delta culture sixty or eighty years ago. One was the neighborhood church and the other was the neighborhood country store. They are images that are representative of delta life during that period in time
The Medical Mural
(2nd & Main)
Painted by the Dafford Mural Company of Lafayette, Louisiana, this mural celebrates the history of the past and present medical facilities in Pine Bluff. The mural panel on the left is the Davis hospital, built in 1910 and is located at 11th & Cherry Street, and the right panel is Jefferson Regional Medical Center which opened in early 1960s and continues to serve the needs of patients in South Arkansas.
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