After the Civil War the pine forests of south Arkansas were mostly obstacles. What changed them was the railroad. Samuel Fordyce built the Cotton Belt from St. Louis through Pine Bluff and Camden toward Texas, and lumbermen from Illinois and Iowa followed the rails. Three Iowans founded the Fordyce Lumber Company in 1892. Mills and section gangs needed hands. Many of the hands were Black, and in the 1890s they were paid less than white workers, which made them attractive to employers and a target for the white tenant farmers, timbermen and railroad workers who, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas says, banded together to drive them out.
Hawthorne Mills and the Cotton Belt
The worst of it came in the last weeks of 1896. On November 9 at Hawthorne Mills, twelve miles southwest of El Dorado, a mob of armed white men surrounded a makeshift camp where Black workers slept and fired more than a hundred shots into it. One worker had already been whipped, and a woman wounded that night was reported to have died.
On December 1 five Black section men were killed while working on the Cotton Belt between Camden and Bearden by a group of unidentified men who opened fire without warning. The white foreman said he did not recognize the attackers, and a Minnesota paper called it "one of the foulest massacres of negroes that has ever blackened the record of that locality." The governor, James Paul Clarke, said he had no information and placed no credence in the report.
Canfield, McNeil and Prescott
On the night of December 12 at Canfield, in Lafayette County, white mill workers who had warned Black millhands to leave surrounded their shanties and shot into them. Twelve were wounded, and they were left without a doctor until morning. The next night at nearby Frostville, nine more were hit with birdshot. Reports said the aim was to run Black workers out of the mills for good. Around Christmas, about twenty were reported shot when white men raided a sawmill at McNeil, in Columbia County, though the mill kept running full time.
The next May, white employees of the Sayre Lumber Company near Prescott set fire to a cabin where ten Black workers were sleeping and shot at them as they fled. Four were wounded and six escaped. A private detective's two-month investigation led to indictments of Deal Beck, Willis Beck, Tom Johnson and Allen Sherry. Newspapers first called them transient laborers; the Arkansas Gazette said the crime was not chargeable to the citizens of Nevada County. In January 1898 a Nevada County jury acquitted all four on what the judge called unreliable evidence, and papers now described Deal Beck as a respected property owner. The Black workers took the message and left.
Newspapers called these events race wars, a label the encyclopedia says is now understood as white mobs rioting against Black Arkansans. Columbia County, where McNeil lies, saw a later chapter at its seat, Magnolia, where Jordan Jameson was burned to death on the public square in 1919. That story is told at Magnolia Square and the Columbia County Courthouse, and the Cotton Belt town of Camden keeps the McCollum-Chidester House.