Isaac Long on One End of a Log: The Founder and the Founding of Batesville's Arkansas College

Abstract

ABOUT THIRTY MILES NORTHWEST OF BATESVILLE, ARKANSAS, lies the hamlet of Lacrosse. Today there is practically nothing to the place, a handful of houses scattered around an abandoned general store/post office that sits at the southwestern corner of an old crossroads. For a time, however, generations ago, Lacrosse was a bustling little village, a In 1868, Michael Shelby Kennard, a thirty-five-year-old Confederate veteran and graduate of the University of Alabama, left a teaching post in Batesville to move to this farming community in the center of Izard County, where he established the Lacrosse Collegiate Institute. For fifteen years, Professor Kennard and occasional assistants drilled students of all ages, from primary-school to lower-college level, in the finer points of Latin, Greek, mathematics, and modern languages. Lacrosse Collegiate Institute's brief life was extinguished, however, in 1883, when a raging tornado leveled the college's building and most of the town. Kennard's little school, never anything more than a hand-to-mouth operation, did not reopen.1 Michael Shelby Kennard's college-building experience was not unique in nineteenth-century America, and neither was his failure. Even in a state regarded by most Americans as remote and off the beaten path of higher education, such as the one at Lacrosse seemed to rise like dandelions in the springtime, only to wither away after a season or two. In the half century between Reconstruction and World War I, colleges of various degrees of legitimacy sprang up in such locales as Quitman, Jamestown (Independence County), Searcy, Judsonia, Altus, Eureka Springs, Bentonville, Sheridan, Helena, Princeton (Dallas County), Vilonia, and Subiaco.2 In the 1890s, Kennard even served as president of another of these upstarts, Mountain Home Baptist College. For a time, at least, it seemed that any young man with a college diploma and a reasonable mastery of Latin, Greek, and mathematics could hang out his shingle and found an academy, even a college. It was within this educational and cultural milieu that Arkansas College made its inauspicious debut in the little White River town of Batesville. For at least a generation, Arkansas College would remain mostly indistinguishable from what southern historian C. Vann Woodward has described as the multitude of superfluous institutions that hung on in a dying from the Old Order or sprouted up thickly in the New.3 There would have been scant reason in the nineteenth century to predict that Arkansas College would somehow survive, that it would greet the twenty-first century (as Lyon College) while most of its contemporaries would never see the twentieth. There was little about Isaac J. Long, founder of Arkansas College, that differentiated him from his fellow academic entrepreneurs. In fact, few people in Reconstruction Arkansas could have matched the academic credentials of Kennard, and both of the institutions he shepherded eventually failed. But Long's effort to bring higher learning to the foothills of the eastern Ozarks bore lasting fruit and proved ultimately to be a significant moment in the history of higher education in Arkansas. In the Reconstruction era, the frontier of the old Confederacy was not a particularly hospitable environment for the liberal arts. Isaac Long had first come to appreciate that fact in the days after his arrival in Arkansas's capital in the summer of 1866. The Civil War had ended scarcely more than a year earlier, and this southwestern city and Confederate border state still bore the physical scars of bombardments and occupations, raids and sieges. The war had rendered every element of southern society a shambles, organized religion included. Concerned about the condition of (their) scattered and feebled churches in Arkansas, leaders of the newly rechristened Presbyterian Church in the United States (colloquially known as the Southern Presbyterian Church) had dispatched Long to observe firsthand both the destitution and potential for growth among their small band of churchmen in the west. …