Region, Religion, and Competing Visions of Mountain Mission Education in the Ozarks

Abstract

In Ozark region of northwestern Arkansas, hamlets of Kingston and Parthenon lie fewer than thirty miles from one another, separated by rugged terrain of Boston Mountains and narrow Buffalo River Valley. In 1920s, journey from Kingston Parthenon was an all-day undertaking, involving a combination of automobile and mule-drawn wagon travel. Located in adjacent counties, Kingston and Parthenon occupied one of poorest and least literate sections of a comparatively poor and illiterate region. So poor and remote were two hamlets, in fact, that both attracted attention of philanthropic educators in decade after World War I. The home mission board of Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) discovered plight of Parthenon, in Newton County, be the most destitute field in state. The observation was an apt reference area's financial status, but true source of county's destitution, as far as home mission board was concerned, was almost complete absence of Southern Baptist congregations in this rugged cranny of Ozarks. With assistance from elected county officials and county superintendent of education, superintendent of home mission board's Ozark Division of Mountain Mission Schools, Hugh D. Morton, convinced citizens of Parthenon donate thirty-five acres for a school site and provide money, materials, and labor for erection of a two-story, native-stone building containing a two-hundred-seat auditorium and seven classrooms. Within a year of school's opening in fall of 1920, local residents had completed on campus of Newton County Academy a second building, a two-story, wood-frame girls' dormitory. (1) The coeducational academy provided a remarkably thorough education for fortunate youth of Parthenon and for teenagers and pre-ministerial students who could scrape up money cover modest tuition and boarding fees or who received one of scholarships sponsored by Baptist churches and laypeople from several towns in Arkansas and Texas. As home mission board intended, school's proselytizing teachers and annual, weeklong revival services brought dozens of children and parents into Southern Baptist fold. Within two years Newton County Academy boasted an enrollment of 184 students, some of whom found themselves participating in one of two literary societies on campus, competing in debates, and studying Latin, advanced mathematics, and other courses beyond rudimentary subjects of typical public, one-room school. In spite of school's popularity and its boon church rolls, Newton County Academy, like other Baptist mission schools in Arkansas, had closed its doors by end of 1920s, a product of Southern Baptists' waning interest in mission schools, financial strains in wake of flood of 1927, and spread of rural public high schools. (2) Across hills and hollows in Kingston, a different denomination came town. In early 1917, just weeks before United States' entry into World War I, Warren H. Wilson, director of Department of Church and Country Life for Presbyterian Church in United States of America (PCUSA, colloquially known as Northern Presbyterians), sent middle-aged Indiana minister Elmer J. Bouher this remote location in Kings River Valley, site of an abandoned mission station. Bouher, who had been longing to get out where there was no church, into a community that most needed ministering to, found in Kingston perfect laboratory in which test his vision of rural rehabilitation. (3) For Bouher and for many other white, native-born Protestants in early twentieth century, citizens of Kingston, Anglo-Saxon core, composed ideal population for this experiment. In his dozen years living among hill people, with their feet deeply set in traditional soil of ancestors, tireless minister reopened PCUSA church, established a Sunday school, lectured farmers on latest progressive agricultural techniques, challenged moonshiners and bootleggers, opened a clinic staffed with a full-time nurse, and lobbied county and state officials for road improvements. …