Historic Figures and Places Associated with First Presbyterian Church of Hope, Arkansas, Part III
By Peggy Lloyd, 04/26/24 5:11 PMIn previous articles, mention has already been made of numerous major figures involved in the building of the new First Presbyterian Church on South Main Street in Hope. None was more important or more prominent than that of Judge James H. Pilkinton. His career would continue for many years after the completion of the new church in early 1954 and the Centennial celebration of the church in 1961. Pilkinton was the son of Ivison L. Pilkinton and Louise Betts Pilkinton of Hope and Washington, Arkansas. I. L. Pilkinton had been born in Guernsey in 1887. He had married Louise Betts, a member of a well-known family in the Hope area, on June 6, 1911, and they became the parents of five children. (Mrs. Pilkinton’s full maiden name was Virginia Louise Betts, and she was a niece of Augusta Betts Barr—the mother of Rev. John T. Barr whose life and career was covered in an earlier article.) Ivison Pilkinton had had a hardware store in Washington, Arkansas, for years, had served two terms in the Arkansas Legislature from 1931 to 1935 and 1935 to 1937 and was head of the Hempstead County office of the State Revenue Department at the time of his death at the age of fifty-eight on March 23, 1945. He was also an elder of the First Presbyterian Church on Second Street in Hope, the site of his funeral service, and a member of the Masonic Lodge. The pastors of both the Washington and Hope Presbyterian Churches officiated at the funeral.
Born on January 15, 1914, in Hope, James Harvey Pilkinton was the oldest child of I. L. Pilkinton, and the energy and variety of his father’s career is reflected to an even greater degree in the amazing career of the son. Pilkinton spent much of his childhood in nearby Washington where his father had his hardware store. He attended school there and graduated from Washington High School before going on to Henderson State Teachers’ College in Arkadelphia. He attended the University of Arkansas School of Law and was licensed to practice before the outbreak of WWII. He also began a career in politics soon thereafter. He was elected to the State Senate from the Hempstead County District in 1938 at the age of twenty-four, the youngest person ever to be elected to that body. He served in the State Senate from 1939 to 1941, then leaving after Pearl Harbor to join the Navy.
Pilkinton returned to Hope to resume his legal career after being discharged from the Navy with the rank of Naval Lieutenant, Senior Grade. He became Prosecuting Attorney for the Eighth Judicial District in 1946 and served from 1947 to 1951. As noted in an earlier article on the First Presbyterian Church of Hope, he was elected Chancery Judge for the 6th Judicial District in 1950, a district which covered nine counties in Southwest Arkansas. Judge Pilkinton returned to his law practice in 1961, the year of the Church Centennial, and was appointed City Attorney for Hope that same year, serving in that position until 1978.
Pilkinton also became involved in politics at the state level. He served as the campaign manager for Senator J. William Fulbright in the 1962 election. In 1964, he served as the Arkansas Campaign Manager for Lyndon Baines Johnson’s successful re-election campaign. In 1966, he ran for Lieutenant Governor but lost the election when he only received 49.7% of the votes.
Pilkinton participated in numerous organizations, served on boards and committees, aided charitable organizations and helped start organizations that benefited the community. Aside from his roles in the Presbyterian Church as elder, member of Session, trustee, teacher of the Men’s Bible Class and former moderator of the Arkansas Presbyterian Synod, he may be best remembered for his interest in history and the preservation of the region’s history, particularly in the old town of Washington, for heritage tourism. Starting in 1958, Pilkinton got the idea to restore the Town of Washington along the lines of Colonial Williamsburg and other similar historic sites. He was the founder of the Pioneer Washington Restoration Foundation. The organization restored historic buildings, reconstructed them as needed and maintained them for the future or moved in historic buildings from the immediate region for restoration and preservation. This work led to the establishment in 1979 of what is now Historic Washington State Park. Pilkinton died in a Texarkana hospital on June 14, 1994. His funeral took place in the First Presbyterian Church on South Main that he had helped build some forty years earlier. He is buried in Rose Hill Cemetery with family members. The Pioneer Washington Restoration Foundation is still working and active today.
Another Hope family attended the First Presbyterian Church for more than three generations and are now known statewide, nationally and internationally for their work in business, government and international business. They are the McLartys. Like many other families, they came to Hope from Springhill, a few miles to the south of the new railroad town. They rose from small town merchants to businessmen with national and international reputations.
Thomas Franklin McLarty (aka “Tom” and later as “Mr. Tom”) was born to Thomas Alonzo McLarty and his wife Bertha Vernita McLarty on July 10, 1897. His father had been born in Georgia about 1870 and had moved to Arkansas and worked as a farmer and then as a merchant in Springhill. By 1920 the family had moved to Hope. Young Tom McLarty had married Kathleen Briant on August 3, 1918. He may have met her at the First Presbyterian Church on Second Street. She had been one of the members of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church that moved to First Presbyterian Church when the Cumberland Church decided to dissolve. The young couple lived on South Main Street, and their son was three months old at the time of the 1920 census. Tom McLarty’s occupation was that of a self-employed “jitney driver” (a cross between a taxicab and a small bus that provided public transportation with a route and schedule that may have been flexible or variable.) His parents had also moved to Hope and were living at 303 Pine St., and the father had become a real estate agent.
Tom McLarty became associated with the local Ford dealership in the 1920s and was a salesman of cars by the time his young son, Thomas Franklin McLarty, Jr., was ten in 1930. By 1931, McLarty, Sr. was a deacon in the First Presbyterian Church and remained in that position for many years. He was also a Mason, a Shriner and a member of the Rotary Club. By 1940, Tom was the manager of Hope Auto Company, and twenty-year-old Thomas Franklin McLarty, Jr. (aka Frank), who had graduated from Hope High School in 1938, was a clerk at Hope Auto. There is no doubt that Tom McLarty had worked hard to build a successful career over nearly twenty years as a car salesman and sales manager. According to the 1940 census, he owned his own home, made a salary of $5,000 per year (a handsome amount for the era), had additional money from other sources and worked 65 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. Together father and son bought the Hope Auto Company, a dealership for Ford and Lincoln, in 1955, not long after the completion of the Presbyterian Church on Main Street. They extended their dealerships to Texarkana and Magnolia and continued to expand the company. Frank McLarty, then in his mid-thirties, soon took over as president of the McLarty company, but Thomas McLarty, Sr. remained the vice-president of the company until his death, and he was also part owner of the Lewis-McLarty Department Store, one of the most popular stores in Hope for many years. Tom McLarty died at the age of seventy-seven on June 11, 1975, and was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery with other family members. He had had a very successful career as a businessman in his region of the state, and his son, his only child, would be even more successful.
Frank McLarty led his family and his community to even greater accomplishments. He was baptized in the First Presbyterian Church of Hope in 1923. Having finished high school late in the Depression, McLarty worked with his father in the family business until he entered the Army during World War II. Prior to going overseas, he married Helen Frances Hesterly of Prescott on March 14, 1943. He participated in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 and was wounded. He won three Purple Hearts and the Bronze Star during his military career, was promoted to the rank of captain and was discharged on December 5, 1945. He returned to Hope, resumed his career in the automobile business, and he and his wife started a family with the birth of their son Thomas Franklin McLarty III (aka Mack) in 1946. A second son, Francis Briant McLarty (aka Bud) would follow in the mid-1950s. Frank McLarty also became active in the Presbyterian Church and started serving as a deacon in 1946. He followed in his father’s footsteps to an even greater degree by being highly active in community organizations in leadership roles. He was a former president of Hope Rotary Club, the Hempstead County United Way and the Hempstead County Industrial Foundation. While he was president of the Hope Chamber of Commerce in 1950, the Hope Coliseum was built which houses the Third District Livestock Show annually. It is also an important part of the Hope Watermelon Festival, one of the largest events in the state, and has been the site of many political and entertainment events over the years. He also had a role in state politics and served as a delegate to several state Democratic conventions during this period. Gov. Francis Cherry appointed McLarty to the State Police Commission in 1953 and may have attended the dedication of the new church because of the activities of such church leaders as Frank McLarty and James H. Pilkinton. McLarty also served on the boards of two banks in Hempstead County.
Despite a busy working life, heavy involvement in the community and a growing family, Frank McLarty also initiated what would be the next step up in the McLarty family fortunes. He had been named to Ford’s National Dealer board in 1960 and had met and had become friends with Lee Iacocca, then an important Ford executive. These connections would have a profound impact on the growth of the McLarty family business.
Frank McLarty became interested in leasing trucks because of the poultry industry which had been expanding in southwest Arkansas since the early 1950s. Trucks were needed to transport eggs and poultry to market. He started M and M Leasing in Hope in 1963. His dealership purchased the trucks and sold them to M and M Leasing which serviced them and provided them with parts in the existing Ford facilities on West Second Street near the railroad tracks in Hope. (The building is now gone but stood just west of the LaGrone Williams Hardware store on the site of what is now the Rainbow of Challenges Recycling facilities.) Frank McLarty had developed the idea of the incentive lease, and his leasing company became the largest in the Ford Motor Company authorized leasing system. Because of his leadership in this industry, he conducted seminars for other dealers throughout the country and became a national figure. As his trucking business expanded, it was also aided by the development of the Interstate system through the state at that time. Frank McLarty’s idea of incentive leasing took his family’s fortunes to a completely new level.
As this new element of the McLarty business grew, Frank McLarty’s health began to decline. His son Mack finished his studies at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville in 1968 and came home to aid his father. The McLarty companies moved to Little Rock in 1974. Frank McLarty died there on July 13, 1977, at the age of fifty-seven. His body was returned to the First Presbyterian Church in Hope for his funeral, and he was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery with other family members.
Helen McLarty survived her husband for eighteen years. She had attended William Woods College in Fulton, Missouri and graduated from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. She had aided her husband in his building of the McLarty Companies to one of the top forty auto dealers in the United States. Shortly after her husband’s death in 1977, Governor David Pryor appointed her to a ten-year term as the first woman member of the Arkansas Industrial Commission in 1978. She had also been active in her community and in her church in Hope. She taught Sunday School and was a leader in activities for women and youth in the church. On June 21, 1980, she married George W. Peck. Born in Missouri in 1911, Peck was a well-known businessman who had lived and worked in Arkadelphia, Hope and, ultimately, Texarkana. (His first wife, Betty Burton Peck, had died in 1978.) The marriage, however, did not work out well, and they divorced on May 5, 1987. Peck died in 1990 and is buried in Stateline Cemetery in Texarkana with his first wife. His former wife moved to Little Rock in 1990 and spent the last five years of her life there. She died in Little Rock on September 17, 1995, after a lengthy illness. Her body was returned to Hope, and her funeral took place in the First Presbyterian Church on Sept. 20. She was buried beside her first husband in Rose Hill Cemetery. Then President Bill Clinton publicly praised Helen McLarty for her life and works and extended his condolences to her family.
Helen McLarty’s son Mack was working in President Bill Clinton’s administration at the time of her death. Mack McLarty had known Bill Clinton, then Billy Blythe, when they were both children in Hope and attended the Miss Mary Purkins kindergarten. Billy Blythe, however, moved away to Hot Springs when he was in elementary school. In 1950, his mother had married Roger Clinton who had come to Hope from Hot Springs to establish a car dealership. The planned dealership did not work out, and the family moved back to Hot Springs. Later, as a teenager, William Jefferson Blythe would change his surname to that of his stepfather. Mack McLarty and the now Bill Clinton would meet again at the 1963 Boys’ State where Mack was elected as the governor and Bill as a senator. Bill Clinton went on to Boys’ Nation in the summer of 1963 where he met and shook hands with President John F. Kennedy in the Rose Garden of the White House. President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, a few months later, but that moment in the Rose Garden fixed Clinton’s vision on becoming president. It was also an enduring memory that bonded him to his lifelong friend Mack McLarty.
Mack McLarty, as noted earlier, returned to Hope in 1968 after graduating summa cum laude with a degree in business administration from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He married Donna Kay Cochran from Texarkana, also a business student at the U of A, on June 14, 1968. He would go on to serve one term as the representative for Hempstead County in the 68th General Assembly in 1971 under Gov. Dale Bumpers. Like his father, he served on the Hempstead County Industrial Foundation prior to moving to Little Rock. In addition to a busy business career, he became more involved in politics, serving as a member of the Democratic National Committee (1974-76), chair of the State Democratic Party and treasurer of the campaigns of Gov. David Pryor and President Bill Clinton. He also took an interest in education and worked to get computers in Arkansas classrooms. His service on boards had also begun in this period. He became the youngest member of the Arkla Gas board and became the CEO of the company in 1983. During this period, President George H. W. Bush appointed McLarty to the National Petroleum Council and the National Council on Environmental Quality. Mack McLarty remained at Arkla until Bill Clinton won the 1992 election for president.
The election of Bill Clinton brought even greater changes to Mack McLarty’s already amazing career. McLarty left Little Rock for Washington to lead the transition team after the 1992 election and was appointed Chief of Staff to President Clinton for the first two years of the Clinton Administration, working to get numerous programs passed for the president in Congress. After resigning as White House Chief of Staff, McLarty remained in Washington in the role of counselor to the president for five years. During this time, he served as White House coordinator of the Centennial Olympic games in Atlanta and the Summit of the Americas in Miami. In 1996, he was appointed Special Envoy for the Americas and would receive the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal. He left the Clinton Administration in June 1998.
Mack McLarty formed McLarty Associates in Washington after leaving government. An advisory firm composed of former ambassadors and journalists, it included Henry Kissinger among its members. The McLarty Companies have also continued to expand and include dealerships that produce between $500 to $600 million in sales with the original dealerships in Hope and in Texarkana still in operation. There are twelve dealerships in Little Rock, North Little Rock and Benton and two collision centers under the management of Mark McLarty, the son of Mack McLarty. McLarty Automotive also has interests in dealerships in Northwest Arkansas, Missouri and Mississippi. Mack McLarty also continues to serve on many boards of directors and advisors for many organizations.
With such a career, Mack McLarty was unable to continue attending the First Presbyterian Church in Hope. He has homes in Washington, D. C., Little Rock and Hope. The family visits Hope from time to time. A privately hired workman spends a good deal of time in Rose Hill Cemetery to make sure that the McLarty grave sites remain in immaculate condition. At Christmas, each year large poinsettias arrive at the First Presbyterian Church in Hope to be placed beside the steps leading up to the Chancel in the sanctuary, and at Easter each year large Easter lilies arrive to be placed in the same spots. The McLarty family has not forgotten their time in the Hope First Presbyterian Church.
The history of the First Presbyterian Church and its members goes on, but that will be a story for another time….
