Calhoun Pioneer Settlement

Harvey Couch was born at Calhoun in 1877 and went to school there two months a year. At seventeen his family moved to Magnolia, and two years later he left school to support his siblings, firing a cotton gin boiler for fifty cents a day. He built a telephone company with his brother and sold it to Southwestern Bell in 1911. In 1914 he bought a short power line between Malvern and Arkadelphia that became Arkansas Power and Light, and Herbert Hoover later put him on the Reconstruction Finance Corporation board.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Magnolia Square and the Columbia County Courthouse — 6.0 mi
  The 1906 courthouse and square at the center of a town founded in 1853, where oil came in 1922, Southern Arkansas University grew from a farm school, and Jordan Jameson was burned to death in 1919.
• Logoly State Park — 8.9 mi
  Arkansas's first environmental education state park, built on the Magnesia Springs resort and a Boy Scout camp, with about 200 acres of mature forest kept as a natural area.
• Arkansas Museum of Natural Resources — 27 mi
  A free state museum on the Smackover field, where a 112-foot derrick, a rebuilt 1920s boomtown street and working pumps tell how oil and bromine remade south Arkansas.

More markers nearby

• General John Porter McCown — 5.8 mi
• Mount Holly Cemetery — 13 mi
• Lamartine Pioneer Settlement — 14 mi
• Lafayette County Court House — 26 mi