Pioneer Farmers in Faulkner County (1818)
by Russell W. Benedict and David M. Tucker
Editor's Note: In describing the “first wave" of farmers to settle in Arkansas,
David M. Tucker used as representatives the Benedict family which arrived in
what is now Faulkner County in 1818. In the article below, we have combined a
first-hand account by Russell Benedict of his family's history with a
description by Tucker of how early 19th century Arkansas settlers built their
log cabins and started their gardens.
John C. Benedict, with his wife, five children [including his son Russell], and
two “noble Scotchmen," arrived at the “mouth of Cadron" in April 1818, where a
block-house had been built “on account of the threatening and warlike attitude
of the Osage Indians." John McElmurry and his sons, David, Robert, John, and
Harvey, lived in and about the block-house, while Ben Murphy and the McFarlands,
Harvey Hager, and the Newells lived just above the Cadron Bluff. At a point now
known as “Red Hill" lived old Adam Kuykendall, with his three sons, Amos, Peter,
and Adam, Jr. Still two or three miles lower down [the Arkansas River valley] we
found Charles Adams, Reuben Euston, and old man Carlisle and sons and still
lower down about four miles were located John Burrows and James Lemmons. Not one
of all these settlers had cultivated a hill of corn or even a garden patch, but
were subsisting entirely on wild game.
John Benedict bought his first home in this country from William Flanagin near
the mouth of Palarm Creek on the Arkansas River.l
The industrious Benedict family represented not the hunters or the traders but
the wave of agricultural settlers who brought seeds to plant and the ambition to
level the great forest.... To clear the land, to construct fencing and housing,
the settler brought the American axe -the most important tool in the new
country. After selecting a good spot of land convenient to some spring or creek,
the settler needed about forty tall, straight trees for a log cabin. He felled
the trees with his single-bitted axe, cut the trunks into fifteen and
twenty-foot lengths, and dragged them to the housing site with the assistance of
a pair of oxen. Perhaps the settler even squared the logs with the aid of a
broadax and smoothed the floor timbers with a hoe-shaped axe called an adze, and
surely he split the roofing boards with a frow [or “froe," a cleaving tool for
splitting shingles from a block of wood]. Then he invited his neighbors to a
house raising.
An expert axe man stood at each cabin corner to cut the notches while the other
men and boys carried and raised the logs. The cabin rose with amazing speed, the
entrance for a door and the fireplace was chopped or sawed out, and by the end
of the day only the roofing or fireplace construction remained for the owner to
finish by himself. To be sure, the finishing touches, the door, shelves,
chinking the cracks with clay, and constructing wooden furniture might be
postponed for some time.
Before planting the Indian garden seeds -corn, pumpkins, and beans - the settler
cleared a small field. Some of the largest and straightest oaks were cut and
split by wedges into fence rails. These zig-zag fences, six to ten rails high,
encircled the field and protected the crops from the hogs, cattle, and deer that
ran loose. Once the settler split enough rails to encircle his field, he never
cut down all the other trees but followed the land-clearing practice of American
Indians. He ruined the huge giants easily by chopping a circle of bark around
each trunk and left the killed tree standing. The underbrush he uprooted with a
heavy grubbing hoe, the mattock, and piled it for burning.
The settIer then plowed among the stumps and the deadened trees of the ruined
forest, planting perhaps ten acres of Indian corn, the principal pioneer food.
Limbs from dead trees began falling on the crop within a year or two, the trunks
toppled over in three or four years. The new ground for corn and another
fifteen-acre patch for cotton, the market crop, required an annual clean-up,
chopping, piling, and burning, until even the tree stumps finally rotted after
six to ten years.2
Footnotes
1Russell W. Benedict. "Story of an Early Settlement in Central Arkansas," as
edited by Ted R. Worley. Faulkner Facts and Fiddlings (January 1961), pp. 17-19.
This article originally appeared in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, X. 2
(Summer 1951 ).
2David M. Tucker, Arkansas: A People and Their Reputation (Memphis: Memphis
State University Press, 1985), pp. 3-5.
Pioneer Farmers in Faulkner County (1818)
Russell W. Benedict and David M. Tucker
Faulkner Facts and Fiddlings, Fall and Winter, 1997, Nos 3-4, pp. 58-59