Carroll County, Arkansas
Carroll County in Arkansas was created November 1, 1833 by the Arkansas Territorial Legislature. As originally mapped, it was much larger than it is today, and included the present-day counties of Boone, Marion, as well as parts of Madison and Newton. Although there is some question as to the source of the name, it is generally believed that the county was named in honor of the Charles Carroll who was one of the signers of the American Declaration of Independence. He had died November 14, 1832, the last surviving signor of the historic document.
Today’s Carroll County is about thirty-five miles wide east to west, and extends about thirty miles south to north, less a big chunk out of the southwest corner. It is in the northwest corner of Arkansas, bordering on the Missouri line, and is the second county east from Oklahoma. Benton County is between Carroll County and Oklahoma. Bentonville, a small town in Benton County, is the unlikely location of the corporate headquarters of Walmart, the largest retailer in the world.
Carrollton was the original county seat, but it was raided numerous times by bushwhackers during the Civil War – from both sides – and the government buildings, including the court house, as well as most of the business establishments, were burned to the ground. In antebellum times Carrollton was one of the three or four major towns in the northern part of the state, but it did not recover from the bushwhacker raids, and after the Civil War the seat of county government was moved to Berryville.
Carroll County is in a region known as the Ozarks, which is a roughly two-hundred-mile-square area in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. It is bounded by the Missouri River on the north, the Arkansas River on the south, the Mississippi River on the east, and the Great Plains on the west. Geologically it differs from the flat surrounding lands, being an ancient upraised plateau, which has eroded for over fifty million years to form the present landscape of hills and valleys, with some grassland that is resistant to erosion.
In Indian times, before 1800, the area was heavily forested with oak and hickory and some pine. The forest cover, on top of limestone and dolomite rock formations, created abundant springs which fed many small rocky-bottomed creeks and rivers. Bass, perch, catfish, carp, and other fish filled the streams, while deer, bear, panther, turkey, quail, coon, possum, muskrat, and other fur-bearing animals lived in the wooded hills along the streams. Though much of the forest is gone, the Ozarks is still a beautiful region of wooded hills, open prairies, and rich bottomland.
Chronologically, the story of Ozark settlement by whites began with the French. They first came to the Ozarks from Canada, where they had been settled for some time along the St. Lawrence River. By the early 1700s the French were well established on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River opposite the Ozarks. Some French hunters, fur traders, and miners from the Illinois settlements were actively exploiting resources in the Ozarks. The resource that made the Ozarks most important to the French was the mining of lead (the Missouri Ozarks still lead the world in lead production).
Control of Louisiana, including Missouri, passed from the French to the Spanish in 1762, and Missouri remained under Spanish control until 1802. However, the Spanish Crown sent very few Spaniards to Louisiana during this period. In fact, those who came to Missouri during the period of Spanish control were French, Americans, and even a few Germans. The Spanish contribution to the culture of the Ozarks is confined to Spanish land grants, a few place names, and myths of hidden treasure. As a result of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 the Ozark region became part of the United States, and the area was opened to white settlement. The few tribes of Osage Indians, who had hunted the region for many generations, were moved to Oklahoma by treaty before the white settlers began arriving.
The settlers coming to Arkansas and Missouri after 1803 were mostly native-born Americans. In the early years they had come from states adjacent to Missouri on the east. Colonel Morgan’s colony from Kentucky, which settled New Madrid, Missouri in 1788, was the first distinctly American settlement. Another early arrival was Daniel Boone. He had been born in Rowan County, North Carolina, but as a young man he had moved to Kentucky. In 1797 he settled his family along the Missouri River. Boone’s son Nathan later settled in Greene County, Missouri where his decaying cabin still stands.
Generally speaking, the early-arriving Americans came from western Tennessee and Kentucky, as well as southern Illinois. As time passed and the frontier pushed west, settlers began coming from the Appalachians proper as well as from areas to the north and east of the Appalachians. Some went west from Philadelphia and followed the Ohio Valley to Missouri. Others turned south at Philadelphia and followed the Great Valley Road down through Virginia to the Carolinas, and then eventually west. In western Virginia settlers could pass through one of the few gaps in the Appalachians, known as the Cumberland Gap. Once through the Gap settlers could follow either the Cumberland or the Tennessee River on their journey west. Both are tributary to the Ohio, and thus these settlers connected with those coming down the Ohio from Pittsburgh.
The settlement of northwest Arkansas started in earnest during the early 1830s. The first group of settlers was comprised largely of veterans of the War of 1812. They came with government land certificates, given to them for war service. Others sought free homesteading land, or to re-establish family ties with relatives who had preceded them. Regardless of their individual reasons, they all came to settle, to tame the wilderness and to establish a style of living that was better than what they had experienced before. It took a special breed of individuals to tackle the frontier, and they all tended to be experienced and resourceful frontiersmen who knew how to cope with frontier dangers and inconveniences.
The core of Ozark life was the family. The church, the trading center, the schools – everything – depended on the family unit to support their very existence. As the community depended on the family units, so the family needed and depended on each member. Their livelihood came from the family enterprise, such as the farm, store, mill, blacksmith shop, or some other community service, and the main source of labor was the immediate family.
Each member had his recognized place and job. Though these were stereotyped as to sex and age, no one thought much about inequality; someone had to do the work from which all benefited, and all worked equally hard. The man and his sons did the heavy outside work, such as the farming, the haying, and working with the livestock. The man, as head of the family, was in charge of the farm (or the business). His authority extended to the barns and fields but ended in the house.
The house, on the other hand, was the woman’s realm. She and her daughters did all the jobs inside and helped with those closely related to daily family life like tending the garden and the chickens and sometimes doing the milking. Her responsibilities included feeding and clothing the family, keeping the house comfortable, and caring for, training, and molding the children.
Many jobs, however, were done co-operatively, each helping the other whenever needed. If the man needed help gathering corn, the wife was probably beside him, often stooped over gathering the down row (the row knocked down by the team) while her husband gathered two or three rows next to the wagon. If she needed help with big house-cleaning jobs, such as the annual task of taking up and cleaning the rag carpet, he gave a hand.
Lighting was poor compared to modern standards. Most homes would have had a kerosene lamp, which had to be cleaned every day. Lanterns were also used, not only in the house, but to light the path to the barn or chicken house. Some people used a reflector lamp which was fueled by kerosene. It was kept on a shelf and had a metal reflector behind the flame to throw off more light.
There could be many annoying little headaches for the lady of the house. Before doors and windows were screened the biggest problem in the summer was insects. In the country there was much to draw flies to the house. The livestock of course, but nearby fruit trees, and water from the slop bucket dumped outside the kitchen door would also draw flies. Small tree branches or dish towels made handy items to shoo flies outside. Everything was covered to keep out flies. Women who left food on the table between meals covered everything carefully with a pretty cloth to protect the food from flies.
Though the yard and house were in the woman’s sphere of responsibility and influence, her special domain was the kitchen. There she was the absolute monarch, but served as cook, maid, and serving girl as well. The kitchen was the busiest room in the house, and most of the essential activities of living took place there. It was there that she prepared three meals a day for the family; it was there also that the meals were eaten. The woman of the house also prepared and canned in the kitchen – or supervised the other female members of the family in doing so – the various fruits and vegetables grown on the farm. She did the washing and ironing there, and it was there that she bathed the smaller children.No other room in the house had the same warm appeal – especially for the children – for it was often filled with pleasant cooking odors.
Before the early pioneers had stoves, they used the fireplace for cooking their food. In practice it was done in a cast-iron skillet hung from the top of the fireplace opening, or in a kettle with little legs which was placed directly over the fire. When the heavy cast-iron wood-burning cook stoves became available they were received as a dramatic step forward. People continued to use the open fireplace for heat, but pioneer wives now could cook with a heat source that – with the adjustable dampers and flues – was somewhat controlled, and the flat surfaces provided a convenient place to set pans and pots. The wood stoves were such an improvement, and so satisfactory, that many older back country wives continued to use them long after kerosene kitchen ranges came into wide use.
Most of the food was prepared at a cook table that was usually located close to the stove. Baking powder, soda, sugar, spices, as well as other staples, were usually kept on a shelf within easy reach as well. Some housewives would tack a curtain around the bottom of the cook table behind which they could store some of their pots and pans.
Pioneer dinner tables were usually long with backless benches, although the man of the house, sitting at the head of the table, and his wife at the other end, might have an individual chair to sit in. A pioneer husband would quite often construct his own table, as well as other furniture. A handmade table, benches and split –bottom chairs of hickory bark, may not have been fancy, but they would have been durable. On hot summer days the family frequently moved the table to an outside porch or lean-to in order to escape the heat of the hot kitchen.
Many farm families were practically self-sufficient, growing or producing most of what theyneeded, and buying only staples. The family usually had a few dairy cattle that provided milk for drinking and for making butter and cheese. Poultry houses furnished fresh eggs daily and chickens for baking, stewing, and frying.
Farm people usually butchered their own meat, but only in the winter when it would keep. Usually two or three families would get together to butcher a steer so that all the beef could be consumed before it spoiled. Pork would be salted in barrels, cured, or smoked and stored by hanging in a secure smokehouse.
Fresh vegetables like beans, potatoes, greens, lettuce, beets, and cucumbers, were grown in large gardens, and fruit from the family orchards included apples, peaches, cherries, and pears. When winter came, root vegetables and fruits like potatoes, turnips, and apples were stored in the cellar or put in the ground and then covered with straw.
To add variety to the menu or stretch out the meat supply (and because it s great relaxation as well as fine eating), men would fish for crappie, bass, goggle-eye, catfish, or suckers, and hunt wild rabbit, quail, squirrel, possum, and coon. Women and children picked wild dock and carpenter’s square in early spring for a mess of greens. They gathered blackberries, dewberries, and huckleberries in the summer and hazel nuts, hickory nuts, and black walnuts in the fall.
Thomas and Nancy Erwin arrived in Carroll County, Arkansas in 1848 and, as near as can determined, were the first of our line to do so. The majority of the inhabitants of the area at that time were of Scots-Irish descent. They were much like the newcomers, a self-sufficient and hardy group engaged primarily in subsistence farming. There would have been a few professional men, and preachers, but they were all poor and living under the same primitive conditions.
Thomas and Nancy lived first in Carrollton, but later homesteaded on Dry Creek near the small thriving community of Denver. They lived for a time in Eureka Springs but in later years returned to their farm. They lived the rest of their lives in Carroll County, and had six more children. Thomas and Nancy Erwin, as well as many of their descendants are buried in the Denver Cemetery.