AAC F A M I L Y & F R I E N D S
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Above: The “Old” Randolph County Courthouse, constructed between 1872 and 1875, has been rehabilitated with $709,647 in grant money. Double Take Randolph County’s Pocahontas is home to two historic courthouse structures.
Story by Mark Christ s Photos byHolly Hope Arkansas Historic Preservation Program
Restoration Grant program, which uses funds from the Arkan- sas Natural and Cultural Resources Council to preserve some of Arkansas’s most-treasured public buildings. Around the same time that Davidsonville was founded in the early 19th century, Ransom Bettis settled on the Black River to establish a community called Bettis Bluff. Future Arkansas Gov. Tomas S. Drew established a business there in the late 1820s and married Bettis’s daughter, Cinderella. Te town boomed with the arrival of steamboat traffic in 1829, and on Oct. 29, 1835, Randolph County separated from Lawrence County. Bettis Bluff, with the new name Pocahontas, became the seat of government.
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he Randolph County seat of Pocahontas is the home of not one, but two historic county courthouses, one of which has particularly strong ties to the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program’s County Courthouse
and by 1839 a courthouse was erected at a cost of $2,400. Te building, located across the street from the hotel where Con- federate Gen. M. Jeff Tompson — the “Swamp Fox of the Confederacy” — was captured in August 1863, survived the Civil War but just barely. Offices were moved from the building during the war as it became increasingly structurally unstable, and in 1870 the two-story structure collapsed. It was replaced on the same site by an Italianate-style mas- terpiece built between 1872 and 1875. Situated in the center of the Pocahontas town square, the two-story building features heavy brick hood moldings over the tall, narrow windows, decorative brick quoins and a tall cupola in the center of the roof structure. Construction was not without controversy. John A. McKay of
COUNTY LINES, SPRING 2016 Drew donated land for a courthouse and public buildings,
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