The Niloak Pottery

Nobody can say for certain who invented the swirl. Tradition credits Arthur Dovey, an Ohio potter who had worked at Rookwood and joined Charles Hyten at Eagle Pottery in 1909, but a 1906 photograph of the Ouachita Pottery already shows swirled pieces. The name is kaolin spelled backward. Hyten, a Benton native, sold the company in 1934 to Hardy Lathan Winburn III, whose crew turned to war work and made more than a million clay pigeons a month in the war's last two years. The company dissolved in the fall of 1947.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Pinnacle Mountain State Park — 19 mi
  A day-use state park west of Little Rock around a 1,011-foot Ouachita peak, with a strenuous summit trail, the Arkansas Arboretum and a visitor center above the Arkansas River.
• Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site — 20 mi
  The 1927 high school where nine Black students entered under federal troops on September 25, 1957, with a National Park Service visitor center across the intersection.
• Big Dam Bridge — 20 mi
  A 14-foot-wide walking and cycling bridge built onto Murray Lock and Dam, 90 feet over the Arkansas River between Little Rock and North Little Rock.
• Arkansas State Capitol — 20 mi
  The neo-classical Capitol built from 1899 to 1915 on the old penitentiary site with state convict labor, free to enter, with the Little Rock Nine monument on the grounds.

More markers nearby

• George M. Holt — 0.6 mi
• William Ayers Crawford — 0.6 mi
• 11th Arkansas Infantry, C.S.A. — 0.6 mi
• The Benton Courier — 0.8 mi