OLD NEWS

Dust fills camp area; smoke fills Hollow

The Camp Pike Gazette was a daily feature of the Arkansas Gazette during World War I. On Oct. 12, 1917, the page featured a three-column cartoon by staff artist Hubert Park making fun of the dust “In and About Camp Pike.” See excerpts from the cartoon elsewhere on this page.
The Camp Pike Gazette was a daily feature of the Arkansas Gazette during World War I. On Oct. 12, 1917, the page featured a three-column cartoon by staff artist Hubert Park making fun of the dust “In and About Camp Pike.” See excerpts from the cartoon elsewhere on this page.

If we can believe what we read in the paper, in October 1917, central Arkansas was dangerously dry.

Dust at the hastily constructed Army training compound in North Little Rock was ... well, let's let the Oct. 7, 1917, "Camp Pike Gazette" section of the Arkansas Gazette describe it:

When You Go to Camp Pike You Don't See Much

The scenery about Niagara Falls, the Royal Gorge, the Hawaiian volcanoes and other well-known spots (see any guide book) is simply an optical affair. You see it, and then you pass on. It remains with you only in memory.

The scenery leading up to Camp Pike is, however, an entirely different affair. You do not see it and pass on; you take it with you. It gets in the automobiles or whatever conveyance you employ and rides with you. You take it home with you, and when it finally departs from your actual vision is when you pull the stopper out of the bath tub and reach for the towel. And then you have probably overlooked some outlying convolution in an ear and friends the next day will remind you that you are still carrying large areas of Camp Pike scenery.

This unnamed reporter went on a bit more about the "bottomlessness of the dust" before describing how the road was being warrenited in discontinuous segments.

One minute you ride upon a smoothly surfaced highway, then you come to a bar across the road and a heartless guard who firmly indicates that this is as far as you go in comfort, and then you plunge into an imitation of a fog on the Newfoundland banks.

Formerly the work wagons returning at the close of the day drew out to the roadside and permitted automobile traffic to stream through, but now the road approaching a detour is made the scene of a chariot race when every driver stands up and lashes his team in order to be the first man to detour ahead of the dust.

As that long-ago October rolled on, fires ate vast tracts of forest west of Little Rock, taking homes in the Pinnacle community. And

a front came through that was cold enough the Camp Pike Gazette pitied draftees from Louisiana and Mississippi shivering in their thin clothes.

It was cold enough that a headline writer saw a silver lining in an inferno near North Little Rock:

Dark Hollow Anyway Saved City a Frost

The too rapid movement of the area of high pressure eastward and the annual forest fire in Dark Hollow were the reasons given by H.S. Cole, director of the Little Rock Weather Bureau, for the temperature of 40 degrees yesterday morning instead of the 30 degrees with heavy frost and freezing weather predicted the night before. ... The forest fire bringing with it a heavy pall of smoke, which rested over Little Rock Friday night, was responsible for only a part of the variance between the actual temperature and the temperature predicted for the morning.

Knowing that today's Dark Hollow is a historically black residential neighborhood, I had to rush outdoors and walk around to calm down. What monster would joke about a fire where people lose their homes?

But later, when I looked up Dark Hollow in Cary Bradburn's book On the Opposite Shore: The Making of North Little Rock, I learned that 100 years ago the area we call Dark Hollow was not a black neighborhood. It wasn't a neighborhood at all. Before 1908, Dark Hollow was more than 3,000 acres of bottomland forest and cypress brakes.

Bradburn dismisses a theory that an old Indian name for the area translated as "Dark Hollow." He says the Corps of Civil Engineers named it, most likely because the swamp was gloomy. Earlier maps had labeled it Loomis swamp.

The Gazette remembered Loomis on Aug. 8, 1909, in a long report on a massive engineering project that was underway to drain Dark Hollow:

The swamp being drained has been known as Loomis lake for the last 25 years, since a man by that name erected a lumber mill on the hill north of Dark Hollow. The man was a brother to ex-Governor Loomis of Rhode Island. He ran the mill until he died about 15 years ago. While the mill has become a memory, except a few remnants of broken machinery on the old site, the name has been and probably always will be retained.

Well, it wasn't. And don't imagine that North Little Rock's Old Mill holds its remains. That tourist attraction was built in 1933.

My search of old newspapers finds "Dark Hollow" in use as early as 1895, when the Gazette's North Side gossip column reported that one Mr. Eckles had caught an otter in there measuring 5 feet, 9 1/2 inches. (Hmm.) And in 1897, the paper described a forest fire very much like the one that kept Little Rock warm in 1917:

Little Rock was enveloped in smoke last night and everybody wanted to know what caused it. It was worse than a London fog and you could almost cut the smoke with a knife. It caused sore eyes without number and was death on mosquitoes. ... The cause of this superabundance of smoke was a breeze which came from the east and brought with it a reminder that in the cypress brakes of Dark Hollow, three miles east of the city, fire has been raging for a week or more past.

From 1909 to 1911, while crews with steam-powered dredging machines worked to install six miles or so of ditches and concrete culverts to drain the swamp, spectators turned out to watch 100-foot-tall trees uprooted with "roots running in every direction for more than 35 feet."

In the memory of many citizens here that have lived in Pulaski County for more than a half-century there has never been a time that the swamp has not contained water, some places being 5 to 20 feet deep, and during a wet season the water is much higher than this.

As the water dropped, children rushed into the teeming shallows to bash trapped fish on their heads and carry them off.

And as the dredging dragged on, residents mourned for the free food the swamp had provided. Wildlife was so abundant that hunters had risked horseflies, snakebite and quicksand -- lots of quicksand -- for the furbearers, fish and ducks.

The banks have been visited every day for years by frog hunters. Women and children go to Dark Hollow after [bowfin] and bullfrogs, just as they go out to pick greens when the blades of dock and mustard are tender in the early spring.

In February 1911, the culvert system opened and Dark Hollow drained. The land was sold to cotton farmers and developers. But it went on catching fire every year or so, and it still flooded. Over the course of decades the neighborhood we know today grew up, with churches, small businesses and houses.

It still floods and you can catch bullfrogs near the interstate access road. It's still a wetlands. But the gloomy old forest is so long gone that even its name doesn't convey the memory.

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“Standing guard on the road to keep speeders from straightening out the curves. Nobody wants his job, tho.”

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“An officer should maintain his dignity and be presentable at all times.”

Email:

cstorey@arkansasonline.com

ActiveStyle on 10/16/2017

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