Women Make Sacrifices

In 1862, a salt works, operating on wells sunk about 40 feet, was set up near Arkadelphia. Hundreds of tons of salt were mined there. The water was boiled down in pans fashioned from old steamboat boilers.

The women of Arkansas wove cloth endlessly, for home use and for the soldiers. Spinning wheels hummed and looms were driven alike in the humblest and most aristocratic homes. Nimble feminine fingers devised a multitude of necessities from the unlikeliest materials. In the southern part of the state, and in other sections of the South, blankets were woven of Spanish moss brought from the Gulf Coast regions. They were, it is said, soft and warm.

Confederate Memorial to Women - Located at the Arkansas State Capitol

No eloquence could portray the courage, the sacrifices, and the ingenuity of the women of that woeful period. It is a record of sublime heroism that can be grasped only with feelings that lie far from any reach of words.

East of the Mississippi, the Confederate armies were gloriously triumphant in 1862. But in the border region between the deeper South and the North, the superior manpower and wealth commanded by the federal forces began to close a tightening grip.

Along in 1862, Gen. T.H. Holmes was put in command of the Arkansas Division, superseding General Hindman. And as 1863 opened, the war in the state was centered mainly in the eastern counties as a result of federal attempts to open the Mississippi.

Arkansas Post fell to the Union forces early in 1863, after a gallant defense by 3,000 men under Gen. T.J. Churchill. It was taken by an enormously heavier Northern force commanded by Gen. John A. McClernand. A fleet of gunboats poured a storm of cannon fire into the historic old town.

The federal invaders left a garrison of about 5,000 men in Helena, and raiding parties went out over the northern and central counties. To add to the travails that came to the state, guerilla warfare had broken out in the northern section. Order was crumbling away, and uncertainty of civilian life and property was added to the terrible toils of the battlefield and the tightening pressure of poverty.