Historic Figures and Places Associated with First Presbyterian Church of Hope

By Peggy S. Lloyd, 02/19/24 11:07 AM

A recent article in Hope/Prescott News announced the nomination of First Presbyterian Church of Hope to the National Register of Historic Places for its architectural and local significance. More recently, formal letters of notification from Scott Kaufman, Director of the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, in Little Rock were sent to Hope Mayor Don Still, County Judge Jerry T. Crane, District 3 State Senator Steve Crowell of Magnolia, District 88 State Representative Danny Watson of Hope, and Peggy Lloyd of Hope and Little Rock who researched and wrote the church nomination. The letters outlined the benefits of a property being on the National Register.

In the previous article on the church, the focus was on the history of the church, its various locations, its architectural style, and the background of Arthur N. McAninch, the prominent Little Rock architect who designed it. But what of the “local significance”? Who made the decisions and raised the money to build the church? Who were they? Were they significant in the community? Yes, they were. Many church members were businesspeople or professionals—doctors, lawyers, local officials or teachers—who were well-known in their community. Others became known in Arkansas, nationally and even internationally. This article focuses on the people who built the church in 1954 or were associated with it and their descendants and their impact in their community, state and nation.

Following the Presbyterian Rules of Order, the congregation voted on April 2, 1952, to form a new Finance Committee to raise the money for the construction of the new church and Sunday School building. The Manse for the church’s pastor had been completed. The committees who had raised funds for that project were discharged as the congregation turned its attention to the larger project at hand. C. C. Spragins, a Hope banker, became the chair of the new Finance Committee. The other committee members included Thomas Franklin McLarty—the manager of a local Ford dealership, C. C. Lewis—manager and part-owner of the popular Lewis-McLarty Department Store in town along with T. F. McLarty, and Mrs. N. T. Jewell who worked in real estate with her husband in the Hope area collecting rents on houses and farms and payments on mortgages. She had also served as president of Women of the Church in 1934. Raising the money for such a large project, $125,000 or more, would take time. It was a great deal of money in the early 1950s.

In another congregational meeting on April 30, 1952, the congregation proposed and elected the Building Committee. James H. Pilkinton was named the chair. Other members selected for the Building Committee were John B. Lowe, Vincent Foster and Mrs. R. Gosnell. Pilkinton, a native of Hope and Washington, Arkansas, was a prominent attorney in Hope and was serving as Chancery Judge for the 6^th Judicial District which included nine counties in Southwest Arkansas when he became chair of the Building Committee for his home church. John B. “Jack” Lowe was the manager of a building materials business in Hope. Vincent Foster was a realtor. Mrs. Gosnell was the church organist and choir director. This committee was authorized in the meeting to seek plans and submit two or more plans or specifications to the congregation.

Many members of the Building Committee and Finance Committee for the manse, which had been completed at the end of 1951 at a cost of $20,000, also served on the same committees for the church. Jack Lowe had led the Manse Building Committee with James H. Pilkinton and Vincent Foster as members. All three men had served in World War II. After the war, Lowe, the son of a contractor and a native of Gurdon in Clark County, moved to Hope with his wife Rowena and bought one of the former officers’ houses in the Southwest Proving Ground. These nice homes, now known as Oakhaven, had been made available to returning WWII veterans at low prices. Jack Lowe and his family became active in the First Presbyterian Church. His wife Rowena would serve as president of Women of the Church during this period of building and change. Vincent Foster also bought a home in Oakhaven. He and his family lived in the one-time Colonel’s house for a few years before moving back to Hope. A businessman involved in real estate and insurance and working long hours, he bought a two-story brick house on West Second Street near the intersection of Hervey and behind what is now the Bill Clinton Birthplace site. The brick house on West Second St. was recently torn down because of structural problems, but in the 1950s it was close to his office in a house at the corner of Third St./Highway 67 and Hervey. That house too would be removed years later when the site was purchased for a Safeway store and its parking lot, now an Atwood’s store and parking lot. Other members on the Manse Building Committee were Mrs. J. W. Branch, wife of Dr. J. W. Branch who founded Branch’s Hospital on the west side of South Main Street a short distance south of the new church site, and Mrs. T. F. McLarty, wife of the T. F. McLarty who was also serving on the Manse Finance Committee. Dorsey McRae, Jr., a realtor and appraiser, was also on the Manse Building Committee but did not move on to the Church Building Committee. He may have been impacted by the sudden death of his father in late 1950 or by other demands on his time. Mrs. T. F. McLarty also may not have wanted to take on such a large project. C. C. Lewis chaired the Manse Finance Committee with T. F. McLarty, his business partner, and C. C. McNeill as his members, but he deferred to C. C. Spragins, an experienced banker, for the chair of the Church Finance Committee. He and his business partner T. F. McLarty stayed on as members. C. C. McNeill was a travelling salesman and a native of Texas who had moved to Hope in 1930. He had served as a deacon in the church from 1943 to 1947 and as a Ruling Elder from 1947 to 1951, but he died on December 31, 1951, shortly after the completion of the manse. Mrs. Jewell replaced him.

The next congregational meeting was held on January 14, 1953, to review preliminary plans for the new church and Sunday School building presented by Little Rock architect A. N. McAninch who also attended the meeting. The congregation requested five changes that included widening the dining room eastward by ten feet and increasing the size of the rooms and chapel in the Sunday School building by two feet while decreasing the size of the hall that ran the length of that building by five feet. They also required that the architect confer with experts on the space needed for the installation of the pipe organ and with Paul Klipsch of Hope. (Klipsch had come to Hope as an Army officer working in the Southwest Proving Ground to test shells and artillery. Already a trained engineer, he remained in Hope after the war and was well on his way to becoming a world-renowned sound engineer. He had started a company in the former Proving Ground to manufacture his sound equipment not long before plans for a new church started in the late 1940s.) Most notably, however, the congregation wanted the spire on the new church to be replaced by a tower. That request was, perhaps, in fond remembrance of the Second Street Church which had had a flat-topped tower since renovations that had occurred thirty years earlier in 1925. Last, the congregation gave the Church Building Committee permission to consider the size of the kitchen, to act on that if necessary, and to make other minor changes without consulting the congregation.

Other congregational meetings would follow. A meeting was held on March 29, 1953, to decide the starting date for the construction of the church. However, money remained an issue. Days later, on April 8, 1953, at another meeting, the congregation voted to start the work with B. W. Edwards of Hope as the contractor supervising the construction. The Finance Committee and trustees were also authorized to negotiate mortgages and loans as needed and to pledge church property as security. On Sunday, May 3, 1953, the church held a ground-breaking ceremony at the new site on South Main. Judge James Pilkinton, chair of the Building Committee, turned the first shovelful of dirt. Members of organizations in the church, the Finance Committee, the Pastor L. T. Lawrence, the contractor B. W. Edwards and the architect A. N. McAninch all attended. The event received front-page coverage in the local newspaper which reported that the new church would cost $125,000. Work commenced a week later and was completed in January 1954.

During construction, however, a financial crisis arose over the costs for construction and furnishings for the new church. The amount rose from the projected cost of $125,000 to an unexpected $150,000, leaving the church $30,000 short of the necessary funds to pay for labor and supplies. It was a large amount for the day. Attempts to sell the old Second Street Church for no less than $20,000 had not been successful. Finally, four men—C. C. Spragins of the Finance Committee, James Pilkinton and Jack Lowe of the Building Committee and the contractor B. W. Edwards—agreed to buy the Second Street Church and its grounds for $20,000 with each man contributing $5,000. Those funds were adequate to solve the crisis.

On January 31, 1954, the new church was consecrated in the morning service. At an evening vesper service, Governor Francis Cherry was the lay speaker. B. W. Edwards formally presented the key to the building to James Pilkinton, chair of the Building Committee, and pastors from different churches in the Hope Ministerial Alliance assisted with the vesper services. This event was also widely covered in the local paper.

On March 24, 1954, a congregational meeting took place in the new church to address pending business. After nominating and electing deacons, the congregation voted to sell the old church, its lots, furnishings and fixtures for a minimum of $20,000, to reimburse the four men who had come forward to resolve the new church’s last minute financial crisis in January. The attendees were proud of their new church, and they also voted to invite the Presbyterian Synod to meet in the new Hope church in the fall of 1954.

The Second Street Church at the corner of East Second and Hazel was eventually sold. It finished its career with the Oakcrest Funeral Home which needed an appropriate site for its funeral services. Older people in Hope may remember attending funerals there. Ultimately, the building was demolished. Today only two sets of concrete steps that were at the front entrances on the southwest and southeast corners of the building remain. Oakcrest later became the Brazzel-Oakcrest Funeral Home, now located at 1001 S. Main in a modern funeral home on the site of the old Julia Chester Hospital—one of the early hospitals on South Main and notable for being the birthplace of future President Bill Clinton who was born there on August 19, 1946.

The next important event in the history of the new First Presbyterian Church on South Main was its celebration of the Centennial of the church held in 1961. The Centennial Booklet of the First Presbyterian Church, Hope, Arkansas, 1861-1961 was immensely helpful in preparing the necessary forms for nomination to the National Register along with papers from the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia, PA, books on architects and architecture, records in the files of the Hope church, newspapers, courthouse records and on-line resources such as Ancestry.com and The Arkansas Encyclopedia of History and Culture. All these resources helped identify people associated with the church who were known locally, state-wide, nationally and even internationally.

One of the participants in the Centennial celebration was Robert Lee Hyatt, a young pastor who was about thirty. He was a grandson of C. C. Spragins who had chaired the Finance Committee for the construction of the new church seven years earlier and the son of Mr. Spragins’ daughter Florence Spragins Hyatt. Florence had married Benjamin Carroll Hyatt of Monticello in Drew County, Arkansas, on September 29,1925, and went to live in her husband’s hometown. Within six years they had four children, three boys and a girl. The youngest was Robert Lee Hyatt born on October 17, 1931, less than eight months before the death of his father on May 6, 1932, at the early age of thirty-five from the effects of an abscess on his liver. Mrs. B. C. Hyatt had to return to Hope with her four young children to live with her parents on South Hervey St. She taught in the Hope schools for many years and was teaching music at Hope High School and playing the piano at school events in the late 1950s and early 1960s. C.C. Spragins, however, did not have the pleasure of seeing his grandson participate in the Centennial at the church he had helped build. The retired vice-president of a bank, he died of a stroke in Branch’s Hospital on May 21,1959, at the age of seventy-seven.

Robert Hyatt had considered a career in teaching initially. He graduated from Hope High School in 1949 and attended Arkansas College (now Lyon College) before graduating from Austin College in Sherman, Texas, in 1953. He completed an M. A. in education at the University of Arkansas in 1956 but soon decided to become a Presbyterian minister. In 1957, he graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, and began a career of over sixty years as a Presbyterian pastor in Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas and Louisiana. He died on February 12, 2023, at the age of ninety-one in Fort Smith, Arkansas. His memorial service was at the Central Presbyterian Church in Fort Smith. His journey from his hometown was a long one, and he did not return to live in Hope. His mother had died in 1982 and is buried in Rose Hill Cemetery along with his older sister Effie Hyatt Frazier who died in 2013. Effie had married George T. Frazier in late 1948. He had come to Hope after service in WWII, worked in radio at KXAR, then got involved in the insurance business and became an early supporter of Bill Clinton as the future president’s political career advanced. He also died in 2013, ten days after the death of his wife who was about ten years his junior. He was a Methodist. Robert’s two older brothers also sought careers away from Hope and in other professions.

Another notable, but older figure present at the 1961 Centennial was Rev. John T. Barr of Norman, Montgomery County, Arkansas. Though he may not be familiar to most citizens of Hope now, Rev. Barr was a native of Hope and a son of the Hope Presbyterian Church. His father John T. Barr, Sr. (1858-1912) came to the new railroad town of Hope in the 1880s where he became a druggist and married Augusta Betts. Augusta was the daughter of C. J. H. Betts, a native of New York state, who had migrated to early Arkansas and became a prosperous cotton planter and slaveholder in the Springhill area of Hempstead County in the antebellum period. The Civil War devastated the economy and the value of his property. He died in 1871. His widow and his children moved to the new railroad town of Hope where Augusta married John T. Barr on April 14, 1885. Their oldest child John T. Barr, Jr. was born on March 10, 1886, and grew up in Hope.

John T. Barr, Jr.’s parents were active members of the Hope Presbyterian church. His father served in city government as an alderman and as mayor of Hope from 1895 t0 1898. Young John attended a private school in Hope and then went on to Arkansas College. After college, he returned to Hope and worked for three years in a cotton company. For a time, he considered becoming a lawyer but decided to become a Presbyterian minister instead. He went to the Union Theological seminary in Virginia and graduated in 1911. In that same year, he began what he thought would be a two-year mission in the busy logging town of Womble (Womble changed its name to Norman in 1925.) in Montgomery County, Arkansas. The two-year mission did not happen. The mission lasted for fifty-one years.

Preaching widely in the area, Rev. Barr saw the need for expanding educational facilities in the region. In 1920, Barr was authorized by the Arkansas Presbyterian Synod to create a mountain mission school in Montgomery County. The mountain mission movement had started in Appalachia in the late 1870s and 1880s and was moving into the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains in Arkansas in the early 1900s. Barr established the Caddo Valley Academy in September 1921 with the goal of providing a high school education and Bible study to needy, worthy students from the region. That goal got some unexpected additions when the local school board had no money and asked the Presbyterian Synod to support a nine-month school year with elementary education and tuition from those who could afford it. Elementary education continued for three years along with high school education. In 1924, the school board took over the elementary education function. By 1930, with Presbyterian funding dwindling because of the Depression and rural schools consolidating, the school board took over the running of the school.

Important changes also occurred in Rev. Barr’s family during this time. His father died on January 10, 1912, in Hope and was buried in Rosehill Cemetery as his son began a career that would last for decades. By 1920 Augusta Barr, a former schoolteacher, was living with her son in Montgomery County to help him with his efforts there. In 1922, Barr married Gretta Cunningham, a schoolteacher who had come to Montgomery County in 1921. She was also the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and became a partner in her husband’s work. By 1930, the Barrs were the parents of a son and a daughter. Mrs. Augusta Barr would continue to live the family until her death in 1939. From the 1930s into the 1950s, the busy pastor and his wife turned their attention to providing a home for children who did not have one for various reasons, who were well-behaved and who needed educational opportunities. The academy accepted a $15.00 monthly fee if a child had resources, but offered its services without fees if necessary and was supported by the Presbytery and donors. It remained in operation until about a year before Re. Barr’ death in early 1963. When it closed, the children were transferred to the Vera Lloyd o Home in Monticello.

Rev. Barr received honors for his work though he did not seek them. In 1934, Arkansas College, his alma mater in Batesville, bestowed an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree on him. He was also a member of the Board of Trustees at his former college. He served as Clerk for the Arkansas Synod for twenty-five years and was named Rural Minister of the Year in 1948. Bruce Blevins, in an article in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, outlined the diversity of the mountain mission schools in Arkansas and noted the energy and emphasis of Barr’s work. The school with a curriculum like that of a prep school in the nineteenth century. It did not assume that its students would return to a rural way of life and not seek higher education. As Blevins notes: “It was a point of pride for Barr that many of Caddo Valley’s graduates continued their formal education beyond the confines of Montgomery County. Caddo Valley Academy was, in short, a school first and a proselytizer of the unsaved second.” (Bruce Blevins is Noel Boyd Associate Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University and has published widely on the region. The article on “Mountain Mission Schools in Arkansas” appeared in the AHQ, Vol. LXX, No. 4, Winter 2011 and lauded Rev. Barr for the quality and objectives of his school.)

Rev. Barr’s life and his work spanned the life of the Hazel Street church in Hope, the Second Steet Church and reached into the early years of the First Presbyterian Church on South Main Street. He preached occasionally in the Hope churches. His brother Harvey Betts Barr lived in Hope and was a ruling elder of the Presbyterian Church from 1946 through the 1961 Centennial celebration, and Rev. Barr’s parents and other relatives were buried in Hope in Rose Hill Cemetery. As his own physical and mental health declined, Rev. Barr spent the last months of his life in the nursing home attached to the old Hempstead County Memorial on South Main St. He died on January 19, 1963. His funeral was held on January 22 at the Norman Presbyterian Church. He was buried in Black Springs Cemetery in Montgomery County beside his wife who had predeceased him in 1959. After his death, the name of the Norman Presbyterian Church was changed to the Barr Memorial Presbyterian Church.

The Montgomery County News best summed up the impact of his life and career in his obituary: “To say such a man as Dr. Barr will be missed is to attempt in words, the impossible. Deeds are his memorial, as they were his life.” Even today, more than sixty years after his death, Rev. John T. Barr is the most notable historic figure in Montgomery County, Arkansas.

There are many significant stories that are part of the history of the First Presbyterian Church in Hope. We will leave more of them for another time….