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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
Dallas T. Herndon, the first director of the Arkansas History Commission and State Archives in Little Rock, opened his short study on the conditions of Arkansas's mountain schools in the 1910s by writing that he was “fully convinced… that no such extreme backwardness in reality exists anywhere in Arkansas as to be found in the most isolated parts of such states as Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky.” Herndon followed this statement with a comical story he had heard about a conversation between a Georgia mountaineer and a “traveler from the outside world.” The traveler, he told, asked the mountaineer if he knew who President Woodrow Wilson and John Slayton, the governor of Georgia, were. The mountaineer openly replied that he did not. Taken aback by such ignorance, the stranger then asked the mountaineer if he knew God. The Georgia mountaineer answered, “Yes, I think I'se heard uf him; his last name be's Damn, ain't it?” Herndon was sure that in the Arkansas hills, no one could find a “man, woman or child who is quite so ignorant as that Georgia mountaineer…”
1 Baker, Russell P., “Dallas Tabor Herndon,” Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture (http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net); Herndon, Dallas T., “Conditions of Mountain Schools in Arkansas,” Unpublished and Undated Report, Microfilm Clippings, 2.4334, Arkansas History Commission and State Archives, Little Rock, AR. From the context and the statistics used in his report, Herndon must have been writing sometime around 1915. The intended audience for Herndon's report is unknown but seems to have been directed at the state's political and educational leaders.Google Scholar
2 Herndon, , “Conditions of Mountain Schools in Arkansas.”Google Scholar
3 See, for instance, Shapiro, Henry D., Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978) and Brooks Blevins, Hill Folks: A History of Arkansas Ozarkers and Their Image (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).Google Scholar
4 On the development of Mountain South studies, particularly Appalachia, and the revision of regional “exceptionalism,” see Billings, Dwight B., Pudup, Mary Beth, and Waller, Altina L., “Taking Exception with Exceptionalism: The Emergence and Transformation of Historical Studies of Appalachia,” in Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Pudup, Mary Beth, Billings, Dwight B., and Waller, Altina L. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Similarly, Blevins, Hill Folks, challenges the perception of the Ozarks as a place and people isolated from the historical currents of greater America.Google Scholar
5 See Shapiro, , Appalachia on Our Mind; Waller, Altina L., “Feuding in Appalachia: Evolution of a Cultural Stereotype,” in Appalachia in the Making; Hsiung, David C., Two World in the Tennessee Mountains: Exploring the Origins of Appalachian Stereotypes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997); David Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Blevins, Hill Folks; Brooks Blevins, Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good OP Boys Defined a State (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2009); Batteau, Allen W., The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990).Google Scholar
6 Blevins, Brooks, “Mountain Mission Schools in Arkansas,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 70, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 403, 414.Google Scholar
7 The myth of lily whiteness in the highland South has been laid to rest, especially by historian John, C. Inscoe's work on blacks in Appalachia. For an overview essay on blacks in Appalachia, see John C. Inscoe, “Slavery and African Americans in the Nineteenth Century,” in High Mountains Rising: Appalachia in Time and Place, ed. Straw, Richard A. and Blethen, H. Tyler (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 30–45. On the African American population in the Ozarks, see Gordon D. Morgan, Black Hillbillies of the Arkansas Ozarks (Fayetteville: Department of Sociology, University of Arkansas, 1973) and Milton D. Rafferty, The Ozarks: Land and Life (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001), 58–61. Still, as Brooks Blevins notes, fewer than 1,000 blacks lived in the fifteen primary counties of the Arkansas Ozarks by 1930 and “[m]ore than half the Ozark counties contained not a single black farm family.” Brooks Blevins, Hill Folks, 211-12. Similarly, there was no large migration of Eastern European immigrants into the rural Ozarks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a phenomenon that alarmed many traditional white Americans who came to fear a “mongrelization” of America. Compared to other parts of the United States, then, the Ozarks appealed to many racially conscious reformers who perceived the region as a secluded bastion of “superior” bloodlines and a stock of people who could be molded into progressive Americans. On racial cleansing in the region, see Harper, Kimberly, White Man's Heaven: The Lynching and Expulsion of Blacks in the Southern Ozarks, 1894–1909 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2012).Google Scholar
8 For an excellent study on the discourse of whiteness, see Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998).Google Scholar
9 Montgomery, Rebecca S., The Politics of Education in the New South: Women and Reform in Georgia, 1890–1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 149.Google Scholar
10 For an important treatment of the role mountain stereotypes played in shifting philanthropic and reform-minded northerners’ efforts away from black freedmen in the South to the predominately white Appalachian Mountains after Reconstruction, see James C. Klotter, “The Black South and White Appalachia,” The Journal of American History 66, no. 4 (March 1980): 686–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 Brooks Blevins, “Wretched and Innocent: Two Mountain Regions in the National Consciousness,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 7, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 257–359. Importantly, Blevins also charts the distinctions between the Ozark and Appalachian images as the twentieth century progressed. For the purposes of this essay, however, which is concerned with school reform in the region during the 1910s and 1920s, the main perceptions of the two regions were largely inseparable, since the Ozarks was usually seen as “a smaller replica of Appalachia.”Google Scholar
12 Brooks Blevins, Arkansas/Arkansaw, 66.Google Scholar
13 Among the educational achievements of Donaghey's administration were the establishment of a new state board of education, unprecedented amounts of state support for high school education, the founding of four agricultural high schools and three new colleges, and a law in 1911 that made voluntary school consolidation easier. Moore, Waddy W., “George Washington Donaghey, 1909–1913,” in The Governors of Arkansas: Essays in Political Biography, ed. Donovan, Timothy P., et al., (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1981), 686–94; Donaghey quoted in Blevins, Arkansas/Arkansaw, 125.Google Scholar
14 U.S. Department of Interior, Office of the Census, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900: Agriculture. Historical Census Browser, University of Virginia, Geospatial and Statistical Data Center (http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html); Gerald Homer Fisher, “The Development of School District Reorganization in Arkansas” (unpublished EdD dissertation, University of Arkansas, 1961), 105.Google Scholar
15 On child labor, see Sallee, Shelley, The Whiteness of Child Labor Reform in the New South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004).Google Scholar
16 Mrs. Walter Hudson, C., “Plea Made Before National Congress D.A.R. in Behalf of Arkansas Mountain Girls.” Pine Bluff Commercial, 11 May 1916.Google Scholar
17 W. R. T., “Our Investment in Arkansas,” Brick Church Life 29, no. 8 (June 1922): 686–94; Hatfield, Kevin L., “The History of Education in Madison County, Arkansas, 1827–1948,” (unpublished EdD dissertation, University of Arkansas, 1991), ’ 240.Google Scholar
18 Bouher, Elmer J., 100% American: The War Story of a Country Church (New York: Board of Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., n.d.), 1–2, Kingston, Arkansas, Collection, 1917–1931, Special Collections, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.Google Scholar
19 , W. R. T., “Our Investment in Arkansas,” 116–17; Hatfield, “The History of Education in Madison County,” 241. As was the case for many other educational reform efforts aimed at poor whites and blacks throughout the rural South, Kingston's “curriculum leaned heavily toward the vocational,” as Brooks Blevins puts it, “with classes in agriculture, blacksmithing, carpentry, stonemasonry, and bookkeeping.” Blevins, however, points out the important distinction between northern-sponsored mission school efforts such as Kingston and the more numerous southern church-sponsored projects in the region, which did not typically follow the industrial school model. Blevins, “Mountain Mission Schools in Arkansas,” quotation on 411.Google Scholar
20 Hatfield, , “The History of Education in Madison County,” 240.Google Scholar
21 “Kingston-in-the-Ozarks,” Ozark Life, July 1928, 34, Kingston, Arkansas, Collection, Special Collections, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.Google Scholar
22 “Kingston-in-the-Ozarks,” 37; Hatfield, “The History of Education in Madison County,” 244.Google Scholar
23 Herndon, , “Conditions on Mountain Schools in Arkansas.”Google Scholar
24 Ibid.Google Scholar
25 “Plain Talk from the Hills” column, Journal of Arkansas Education 1, no. 1 (January 1923): 21.Google Scholar
26 Ibid.Google Scholar
27 “Plain Talk from the Hills” column, Journal of Arkansas Education 1 (February 1923): 12. The stereotype of the Ozarks as a land of feudalism and peonage where “barons” or “mountain bullies” lorded over the “apathetic” peasantry in hill communities was perpetuated by the national newspaper coverage of the infamous and mysterious Connie Franklin murder case in Stone County in 1929. Brooks Blevins, “The Arkansas Ghost Trial: The Connie Franklin Case and the Ozarks in the National Media,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2009): 246, 254–55.Google Scholar
28 “Plain Talk from the Hills” column, Journal of Arkansas Education 1 (June 1923): 14–15.Google Scholar
29 “Plain Talk from the Hills” column, The Journal of Arkansas Education 2, no. 3 (November 1923): 29.Google Scholar
30 Grantham, Dewey W., Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 248; Link, William A., The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1992), 212–14.Google Scholar
31 Bond, J. L. to Flexner, Abraham, 17 July 1916. General Education Board Records: Early Southern Program, Arkansas Records, Microfilmed Copies of Originals, Arkansas History Commission and State Archives, Little Rock, hereafter cited as GEB Records.Google Scholar
32 “Conditions in This Special Group of Counties,” September 1916, GEB Records.Google Scholar
33 Ibid.Google Scholar
34 Ibid.Google Scholar
35 “Important Educational Statistics, School Year Ending June 20, 1916, Special Group Mountain Counties,” September 1916, GEB Records. Though statistics were used for Franklin County, that county was not included in the proposed “Special Group.”Google Scholar
36 “Mason Valley School District,” Benton County Pioneer 45 (2000): 4; Willie Jackson, “The Willow Spring School,” Izard County Historian 14 (1983): 39; Julian Smith, “Mount Vernon School History,” Lawrence County Historical Quarterly 8 (1985): 24; “Educational Advancement,” Newark Journal, 16 October 1914.Google Scholar
37 Flexner to Bond, 27 January 1917, GEB Records.Google Scholar
38 William, A. Link notes that a special agent for mountain schools was also employed by the GEB in Tennessee. Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 213–14.Google Scholar
39 Bond to Wallace Buttrick, 29 January 1917, GEB Records.Google Scholar
40 Halbrook, William E., A School Man of the Ozarks: Being an Autobiography of William Erwin Halbrook (Van Buren, AR: The Press-Argus, 1959), 10–18, 31–40.Google Scholar
41 Ibid., 42.Google Scholar
42 Ibid., 52, 55–56.Google Scholar
43 David, C. Historian Hsiung argues in his study of mountain stereotypes in East Tennessee that more cosmopolitan-minded mountain people, in expressing frustration with “backward” mountain people who resisted their booster efforts, were just as responsible for developing highland South stereotypes as outsiders were. Hsiung, Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains. On Halbrook's experience with school consolidation and rural resistance, see Halbrook, A School Man of the Ozarks, 135–37.Google Scholar
44 Halbrook, , A School Man of the Ozarks, 81, 87.Google Scholar
45 Sage, E. C. to Bond, 27 May 1918, and Sage to Bond, 21 May 1919, GEB Records.Google Scholar
46 Flexner to Bond, 11 June 1920; Bond to Flexner, 2 March 1921; and Halbrook to Flexner, 15 May 1917, GEB Records.Google Scholar
47 Halbrook to Wickliffe Rose, 21 July 1925, GEB Records.Google Scholar
48 Halbrook to Buttrick, 22 July 1925, GEB Records.Google Scholar
49 Halbrook, A School Man of the Ozarks, 85–88.Google Scholar
50 Ibid., 102.Google Scholar
51 Biennial Report of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1929–1930 (Little Rock: State Department of Education, 1930), Tables XIX and XXV, 264–265, 280–81.Google Scholar
52 Johnson, Ben F., III, “‘All Thoughtful Citizens': The Arkansas School Reform Movement, 1921–1930,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 46 (Summer 1987).Google Scholar
53 On rural school consolidation, see Reynolds, David R., There Goes the Neighborhood: Rural School Consolidation at the Grass Roots in Early Twentieth-Century Iowa (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999); Perkins, J. Blake, “Dynamics of Rural School Consolidation in the Arkansas Ozarks, 1900–1950,” (unpublished master's thesis, Missouri State University, 2010). In his recent work on Appalachia and the politics of economic development since 1945, historian Eller, Ronald D. includes rural school consolidation among those modernizing, growth-oriented policies that only worked to exacerbate inequalities and unevenness in that region by decaying local communities and traditional opportunities in rural areas, instead of lifting all boats as promised. Eller, Ronald D., Uneven Ground: Appalachia since 1945 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 686–94, 245–46.Google Scholar
54 Halbrook, A School Man of the Ozarks, 135, 108.Google Scholar
55 Fisher, , “The Development of School District Reorganization in Arkansas,” 315.Google Scholar
56 Morgan, Gordon, “Report from the Ozark Mountains,” unknown newspaper clipping, 7 March 1979, Box 36, Folder 50, Washington County Historical Society Collection, University of Arkansas Special Collections, Fayetteville.Google Scholar
