Becoming an Arkansas Historian: Interviews with Margaret Ross

Abstract

THE ARKANSAS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION shares a mission of promoting the preservation, writing, publishing, teaching, and understanding of history with many individuals, institutions, and organizations. But, surely, no person did more to advance those ends than Margaret S. Ross, who died this past December in Little Rock. Mrs. Ross served as associate editor of the Historical Quarterly for forty years (1953-1993) and sat on the Historical Association's board of directors between 1968 and 1979. Over the course of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, she published more than a dozen articles in the Quarterly, ranging in subject from the New Madrid earthquakes to the press during Reconstruction to camp meetings in Faulkner County. Many more Arkansans, however, knew Margaret Ross through her work as staff historian at the Gazette. Beginning in 1958 and continuing through 1968, the Gazette published her column of state history, Chronicles of Between 1961 and 1965, the column marked the centennial of the Civil War by offering what amounted to a day-by-day history of the conflict in Arkansas. When the centennial had passed, Chronicles of Arkansas became a weekly column and once again ranged far and wide through the state's past. A caretaker and intrepid miner of editor J. N. Heiskell's vast collection of historical material, Ross also served as curator at the Gazette Foundation Library and in 1969 published The Gazette: The Early Years, 1819-1866; A History. In 1979, she resumed a regular column for the Gazette. Called Grass Roots, it served as a forum for genealogy and local history until 1984. Ross also had the distinction of being founding editor of the Pulaski County Historical Review, which continues to this day to be a journal of the first order. She edited the Review from 1953 through 1957. In February and April, 2000, Roy Reed and Jeannie Whayne interviewed Mrs. Ross for the Center for Oral and Visual History. Excerpts from the interviews have been combined below to create a chronicle of her development as one of Arkansas's premier historians. They are published with the permission of the Center for Oral and Visual History. Jeannie M. Whayne: Where were you born? Margaret Ross: 2609 Pike Avenue in North Little Rock. At that time, it was right on the edge of the city. JW: When were you born? MR: August 24, 1922. JW: Tell me about your mother and father. MR: Well, my dad, his parents came to what's now North Little Rock -at that time it was a separate city called Baring Cross. [They] had lived, prior to that, in Faulkner County. They had married and lived at Greenbrier or somewhere like that for a while and then moved down into this area. In 1903, they moved into Baring Cross. [My grandfather] was, at that time, working for the railroad. It later became the Missouri Pacific. I guess it was Iron Mountain then. Baring Cross was a little town that was four blocks square, four blocks running each way. Later it was taken, of course, into North Little Rock, but it was almost entirely a railroad town. My dad went to the North Little Rock public schools. After that [he] was with the YMCA, the old YMCA. He got tired of moving around and came back home. He was a blacksmith at the time I was born. Then he worked selling motor oil to service stations. He was a wholesale distributor for Quaker State Motor Oil, and he had all of Arkansas. Dad didn't have a college education. He just went to the public schools, but the thing he liked to do most was read. He was pretty much self-educated. When I was a little girl, he had me reading things like Plato and Aristotle because that's what he read. He read a lot of different things. JW: Tell me about the school you went to, and when did you start going? MR: I was six years and, of course, you started off to the school in those days completely ignorant. …