Date of Visit: 25 January 2024
Des Arc, AR
55º dense fog advisory, light rain
If Pinnacle Mountain caused me to ask “who gets to determine what a mountain is?” then my 15th park, Lower White River Museum made me ask “who gets to determine what a park is?” Located in Des Arc (population approx. 1,900), this museum park is self-contained within four walls. While small, I found lots and lots of information here about the White River in general, and about the lower portion of the river specifically. The museum houses exhibits on the history of the local area concerning: the Civil War, Education, Medicine, Agriculture, Timber, Fishing & Hunting, and the most important of all, Pearling and Button Making.
I started my visit with this amazing map used by a local lumber company, labeled “a blue line copy of a hand-drawn map from the early 1900s.” What the picture fails to depict accurately is the size of the map. I’m terrible at estimations, but this thing is quite large, and I couldn’t help but think of who might have carried it around, folding and unfolding it, while navigating the land and the river. Around the corner from this display, I found information on early Euro-American settlers to the shores of the river. These folx poled up the river on flatboats that they hauled up on shore and dismantled to use the wood as material for their first shelters. What is that old story about any number of explorers/conquerers burning their ships so their people would have no choice but to go forward? Farther along, in the Civil War display, I learned that the “deadliest single shot” of the war killed 105 Union troops in the Battle of St. Charles. I had to investigate and found out this happened when a Confederate artillery shell hit a Union ship square in the steam drum, which did the initial damage.
The education exhibit provided some levity, offering up a set of “Teacher Rules” from 1872. These included the following. #4 “Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly.” #6 “Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.” And #7 “Every teacher should lay aside from each pay a goodly sum … for their benefit during their declining years so that they will not become a burden to society.” All this and you had to provide the water and the coal each day, too! By 1915, some new rules ruled, including this #4 “You may not loiter downtown in ice cream stores.” This begs the imagination to ponder just exactly what those teachers got up to!
Pearling and button-making take up the greatest share of the museum, given how important the industry was from the end of the 19th century until the mid-twentieth. Originally harvested by hand and searched for pearls, the mussel industry expanded in 1900 “with the invention of a machine that could cut buttons from [the] shells.” And here is where I got very excited because, the factories along the White River and many, many others, including the Mississippi River, mostly cut “blanks,” the button rounds. The cutting factories shipped these buttons where? To Iowa, of course, where Muscatine became known as “Pearl City.” I love finding these connections between where I’m from and where I am. Shellers harvested the mussels using “crowfoot hooks,” shown in this picture. They dragged long bars from which these hooks dangled over the mussel beds. Irritated by the hooks, the mussels opened up and clamped down on them, only to be pulled from the riverbed.
I ended my time in the museum as it began, with a map. This one entirely different. Equally as cool as the lumber map, this one, of the entire state and the major rivers, was made entirely of carpet and mounted on the wall from floor to ceiling. Those rivers are not dyed! Someone hand cut the brown carpet and the blue carpet to create this map.
After my visit, a short drive from the museum took me down to a nice riverside park where I mulled over all of the history while watching the rain-bloated river roll by.
Up next: 3/4 of the Red River Campaign: Jenkins Ferry Battleground, Mark’s Mills Battleground, and Poison Springs Battleground.
