What did Pine Bluff, the home of Arkansas's public HBCU the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, look like in 1880? Probably not too unlike the small Arkansas town that Huck Finn and Jim visited with the King and a Duke in Mark Twain's novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
Then we went loafing around the town. The stores and houses was most all old shackly dried-up frame concerns that hadn’t ever been painted; they was set up three or four foot above ground on stilts, so as to be out of reach of the water when the river was overflowed. The houses had little gardens around them, but they didn’t seem to raise hardly anything in them but jimpson weeds, and sunflowers, and ash-piles, and old curled-up boots and shoes, and pieces of bottles, and rags, and played-out tin-ware. The fences was made of different kinds of boards, nailed on at different times; and they leaned every which-way, and had gates that didn’t generly have but one hinge—a leather one. Some of the fences had been whitewashed, some time or another, but the duke said it was in Clumbus’s time, like enough. There was generly hogs in the garden, and people driving them out.
All the stores was along one street. They had white domestic awnings in front, and the country people hitched their horses to the awning-posts. There was empty drygoods boxes under the awnings, and loafers roosting on them all day long
When writing my article about J. C. Corbin, the nineteenth century mathematician and founding president of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, I was curious about where the college and other buildings were located. I found that it is challenging to figure out where nineteenth century buildings stood. Only a handful of buildings are still standing. Most of Pine Bluff was simple wooden frame houses that have long been torn down (although there are some notable exceptions like the historic courthouse). Worse, addresses weren't numbers in the 1880s, and most of the streets were renamed around 1900. Thankfully, the town layout remains largely the same. With work, I was able to match street names and create the following Google Maps.
What does the map show? First, Pine Bluff has grown a lot over the past hundred-some years. The second location of the college (one of the left-most pinned locations) was the outskirts of the town in 1880. Now this is deep within city limits.
For the college's first five years, it was run out of a rented home. No dormitories were available to students, so most found private accommodations. Unfortunately, I was only able to identify the home of one student, George W. Bunn. Many of the other student lived at the intersection of "Bell and River," but these streets that I have not been able to identify.
What else? The town had little to offer in terms of culture. There was no library, and while town directory lists three or four bookstores, these were really stores that sold books. Three of the stores, Nelson & Dewoody, Young & Kite and J. H. Scull & Bro., were druggists shops that also school books and stationary along with other items. The closest thing to a bookstore was Samuel Mayer's News Depot. All four businesses advertise that they sell school books (rather than books in general), so presumably their customers were students from local high schools in need of textbooks.
 |
Advertisements from the 1876 Pine Bluff town directory
|
 |
| Another advertisement from the 1876 Pine Bluff town directory |
 |
| An advertisement from the 1881 Pine Bluff town directory |
