Street Lighting Opposed

Those gas lights, though they covered, at first, only a small part of the city, must have been a delightful boon. The streets of that day were full of holes and ruts, abounding in facilities for breaking ones neck.

Yet, no doubt, some of the older folks looked with disapproving eyes on the startling innovation. Not a great many years before, street lighting had been severely condemned by leading citizens as a “presumptuous thwarting of the intentions of Providence.” In all likelihood, some of that point of view remained in 1860.

But the majority of Little Rockians hailed the new gas lights as a happy stroke of progress. A humorist of the day observed, however, “It is a bad sign to see a man at midnight with his hat off explaining the principles of democracy to a lamp post.”

Though the Arkansas newspapers of 1860 and early ’61 cackled with discussions of slavery and state’s rights, they give little indication of the typhoon of war that was so soon to break over the land. Their columns reflected for the most part normal activity of a virile, expanding and picturesque order of life.

A vast tide of Southern emigration was moving west, the papers noted, in Arkansas, to Texas, and Missouri, and “some for the Lord knows where.” Pine Bluff had a flourishing horse and mule market, said to be the best in the state, 50 droves of the animals having arrived there in 1860. Buyers came from neighboring states, and as a suggestion of what prices were, it was cited with pride that eight horses sold one day for “upwards of $100 each.” Cotton, in November 1860, brought nine to eleven cents a pound at Memphis.

The firemen of Little Rock gave, on the evening of November 15, 1860, what was described as a “brilliant” ball. That same month, the State Fair, at Little Rock, drew big and happy crowds. It closed with a “tournament” – a diversion in which horseback riders in full tilt tried to trust a lance through an iron ring about two inches across, hung eight feet from the ground.

Officers' quarters on the grounds, now known as MacArthur Park, in Little Rock, erected some time in the late 1840's or 1850's.

Another popular Little Rock entertainment was watching teams of Indians on the arsenal grounds, now the City Park, play lacrosse – a sort of mixture of football, tennis, and basketball, high jumping and ring-around-a-rosy.