Page 29 - Pine Bluff and Jefferson County, Arkansas {1893}
P. 29
JEFFERSON COUNTY, ARK. 27
small farms dotted thickly over it, the hitherto rejected a bounden duty to decry us in the eyes of the world, in-
belts of land along the marshy swamps would be re- stead of setting forth our good qualities.
claimed by systematic drainage, and the malarial vapors
neutralized by groves of eucalyptus and other disinfect- For the years following the war, the condition of
ing processes. At the same time it is not advisable for Arkansas was most critical. During that period the
new-comers to settle in the river bottoms. They should eyes of the rest of the Union were intently gazing upon
select the uplands or the creek bottoms, and await the its various phases of life and action while passing
time when the advance of railroads and the other pro- through a most trying social and political ordeal.
cesses which changed the Illinois swamps of 50 years Hearsay evidence was often employed and political cap-
ago into the healthful dwelling places of the present ital manufactured by the press out of the most ordinary
time, will have here effected similar results. occurrences of civil life.
Anarchists in Pennsylvania or Illinois might murder
COLORED INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTE (SISTERS OF CHA
PERSONAL SAFETY. citizens by the dozen, in defiance of State authorities;
Though it looks an absurdity to people of Arkansas to railroad employees in Ohio might band together and
obstruct general travel, to the danger of the lives of
refer to the safety of their State, it might be expected
thousands of people; mobs might gather in New York
of us to allude to the matter. Greece and Rome are and Massachusetts, demanding bread or work in menac-
said to have attained their exceptional prominence in
history, not because they possessed braver men and ing tones; anything else of a like nature and worse
nobler women and greater numbers of them than other character might transpire in any Northern city without
contemporary nations, but by reason of their good fortune attracting special attention from news agents; but the
in having a greater number of fluent historians. The moment any trivial oSense of law happened in Arkansas,
the whole country must be aroused from peaceful slum-
Southern States, since the close of the late war, are in- ber to gaze upon a more than Bulgarian atrocity.
debted to much the same cause for their unenviable
Whatever hopes or fears may have been the secret of
—place in the sensational annals of the times with this this unfortunate condition of affairs, they no longer
material exception, that our historians have deemed it
