• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_7UkcMVzag

Mr. & Mrs. William Woodruff Man in full Masonic regalia

James Sevier Conway(1836-1840)

First Governor of Arkansas

James Sevier Conway was born on December 4, 1796, in Greene County, Tennessee, the son of Thomas Conway and Anne Rector Conway. James Conway and his brothers and three sisters were raised on a prosperous frontier plantation and received their education from private tutors. In 1818 the family moved to St. Louis, probably to be near Anne Conway's uncle, the Surveyor General of the vast Missouri Territory. In the first two decades of the 19th century, the United States was rapidly settling east of the Mississippi River and fortunes were to be made speculating in frontier land. No one was better positioned to take advantage of this opportunity than the surveyors who first encountered these new territories and opened them up for settlement. In 1820 James Conway and his older brother Henry were appointed surveyors for the newly formed Arkansas Territory. Almost all of the early surveyors of Arkansas were, in fact, related in some fashion. Combined with their advance knowledge of the best lands, this gave them a tremendous advantage during the early settlement of Arkansas. As a result four interrelated families of former surveyors would dominate Arkansas politics for most of the antebellum period. The families were the Conways, the Rectors, the Seviers, and the Johnsons. Collectively they were referred to as the "Dynasty," or more often as "the Family."

Hanging in Fort SmithSassafrasPrairie Sultana

Burning

Pleasant SpringsSchool

Steamboats At Newport

Brooks-Baxter War

The Sultana on April 26, 1865

The Sultana on April 27, 1865

Slave auction. This was a typical scene throughout the south.

Lincoln, “The Great Emancipator”, Entering Richmond 10 days before

His assassination.Runaway slaves escaping.

Thomas W. Jackson was an illiterate brakeman for the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company. He related the jokes and tall tales he heard on his journeys to his wife, who wrote them down for him. These collected jokes served as the basis for his first book. This is a copy of the 1942 revised edition of that first book, which was published in many editions from 1903 up to the 1950's, when its politically incorrect humor went out of style. The book initially became popular when it was hawked to railroad passengers headed to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. It went on to become the bestselling joke book in American history.

• 1836: Arkansas becomes the 25th state of the union on June 15th.

• 1837: During the First General Assembly at the Old State House, John Wilson, Speaker of the House, killed Representative Joseph Anthony with a Bowie knife during a fight on the legislative floor.

• 1860: the population of Arkansas is 435,450 including 111,115 black slaves and 11,481 slave owners.

• 1864: A unionist convention abolishes slavery in Arkansas and adopts a new constitution for the state.

• 1868: Ku Klux Klan violence leads to 13 counties being placed under martial law. Scott Joplin born.

• 1871: Completion of a railroad between Memphis and Little Rock.

• 1883: The Mosaic Templars is founded in Little Rock.

• 1887: Bauxite is discovered south of Little Rock.

• 1895: William Grant Still born.

1868--1917

• Scott Joplin, the "King of Ragtime" music, was born near Linden, Texas on November 24, 1868. He moved with his family to Texarkana at the age of about seven.

• Even at this early age, Joplin demonstrated his extraordinary talent for music. Encouraged by his parents, he was already proficient on the banjo, and was beginning to play the piano. By age eleven and under the tutelage of Julius Weiss, he was learning the finer points of harmony and style. As a teenager, he worked as a dance musician.

• After several years as an itinerant pianist playing in saloons and brothels throughout the Midwest, he settled in St. Louis about 1890. There he studied and led in the development of a music genre now known as ragtime--a unique blend of European classical styles combined with African American harmony and rhythm.

• In 1893, Joplin played in sporting areas adjacent to the Colombian Exposition in Chicago, and the following year moved to Sedalia, Missouri. From there, he toured with his eight-member Texas Medley Quartette as far east as Syracuse, New York. One of his first compositions, The Great Crush Collision, was inspired by a spectacular railroad locomotive crash staged near Waco, Texas in September of 1896

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• In the late 1890s, Joplin worked at the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia, which provided the title for his best known composition, the Maple Leaf Rag, published in 1899. This was followed a few years later by The Entertainer, another well known Joplin composition. Over the next fifteen years, Joplin added to his already impressive repertoire, which eventually totaled some sixty compositions. In 1911, Joplin moved to New York City, where he devoted his energies to the production of his operatic work, Treemonisha, the first grand opera composed by an African American. At the time, however, this resulted unsuccessfully.

• After suffering deteriorating health due to syphilis that he contracted some years earlier, Joplin died on April 1, 1917 in Manhattan State Hospital.

• Although Joplin's music was popular and he received modest royalties during his lifetime, he did not receive recognition as a serious composer for more than fifty years after his death. Then, in 1973, his music was featured in the motion picture, The Sting, which won and Academy Award for its film score. Three years later, in 1976, Joplin's opera Treemonisha won the coveted Pulitzer Prize.

• 1900: The cornerstone of the new state capitol is laid on November 27on the former grounds of the state penitentiary. By the end of the year, forty-two Arkansas counties will have banned liquor sales.

• 1906: Diamonds discovered in Pike County.• 1908: Louis Jordan born in Brinkley.• 1912: Conlon Nancarrow born in Texarkana.• 1915: Statewide prohibition of liquor is passed. • 1917: Arkansans muster in for WW1 service. 72,000 serve—2,000 die, most

from disease and accidents. • 1919: Race riots in Elaine in October. Between 30 and 100 deaths. Governor

Brough convenes an investigation into issues dividing blacks and whites. • 1921: Oil discovered in Smackover. • 1932: Johhny Cash born in Kingsland.• 1939: Luther Allison born in Widener.• 1941: Arkansans join war effort—200,000 serve, 4611 die in service. • 1942: Internment camps for Japanese-Americans established near Rohwer.• 1948: University of Arkansas admits African-American Silas Hunt to Law

School, becoming the first public university in the south to integrate.