Historic Arkansas Museum
This institution is part of the Department of Arkansas Heritage, and it focuses on Arkansas’ pioneer era, from colonial times to statehood and especially through its territorial period (1819 to 1835). It features permanent and periodic exhibitions, performances and events, and a number of territorial-era buildings. It has been my privilege to help write educational materials for the use of teachers and students who visit the museum and who ask for Arkansas history materials for classroom use. My involvement with the museum has also included performances drawn on the Arkansas Stories project, participation in other live events, and development of video and audio pieces. I look forward to continuing this relationship for a long time to come. The museum’s website is found at: http://www.historicarkansas.org
Arkansas Stories
This began with a set of original songs about people and events in Arkansas history that I mostly wrote while making a daily two-hour commute from Mountain View to the studios of Arkansas Educational Television Network in Conway. Two groups of people have turned it into more than I ever imagined it might be. The Mountain View area trio known as "Harmony," Mary and Robert Gillihan and Dave Smith, has mastered and recorded the repertoire of songs, now more than three CDs worth, and we’ve presented dozens of live concerts for schools, colleges, libraries, historical societies, and many general audiences. Archeological Assessments, Inc., a firm led by Jack and Mary Bennett that followed a practice of adding school and community presentations to their major contract projects, supported the recordings and has produced a K-6 Arkansas history curriculum based on the Arkansas Stories concept. The project, which has also included programming for Arkansas' NPR affiliates, seems to have a life of its own, and we are always eager to see what the next development will be. The website, which mostly focuses on the curriculum materials, is at: http://www.arkansasstories.com
Assorted writing projects
Watermelon Island is the name given over two hundred years ago to a piece of land along the Ouachita River near where I grew up in southwest central Arkansas. A branch of the Caddo lived there for over a thousand years, and French adventurers, American settlers, slaves and their masters, sawmillers, and sharecroppers have come and gone. This is shaping up into a thematic collection of short stories.
Poison Spring is the southwest Arkansas site of a civil war battle known mainly as a massacre of black union troops by white and Choctaw confederates. My intent is to tell the story over two or three generations of some who met here: Blacks, White confederates, White unionists, and Choctaw. This will probably involve a collection of songs and essays.
The Brooks-Baxter War, like the Reconstruction era that spawned it, was a strange brew of tragedy, irony, and glimmers of hope. The details of its events read like comic opera, with platoons of mercenaries and volunteers posturing and brawling over competing claims to the governorship of Arkansas. With some help, I hope to turn it into musical theatre.
