Winter 1978 Volume 1 Number 1 Early Days in Lawrence County
W.E. McLeod
(Reprinted from Arkansas Historical Quarterly by permission of the author's daughter, Mrs. Ray Cunningham, Imboden.)
George West and George Ruddell for the Settlement of Strawberry and John C. Lutteg and James F. Moore for the Settlement of White River. After these appointments, justices were appointed for townships instead of settlements. The number had increased to nine in 1819.
Lewis DeMunn was appointed circuit and county, clerk by Governor William Clark of Missouri Territory June 19,1815, and he was commissioned on July 6, 1815. He had previously been appointed, on January 22,1815, Colonel Commandant of the Eighth Regiment and sworn in April,1815. He served as clerk until December 22,1815, and then resigned. Richard Searcy was then appointed and served four years. Both were competent men and made their impress on the early history of the county. At the expiration of his term as clerk, Searcy moved to Batesville, where he lived the rest of his life known as a distinguished lawyer throughout the territory, and loved and honored for his admirable traits. He died July 22,1833, and his remains repose in the old Batesville cemetery.
DeMunn was said to have been a refugee from the French Revolution. So far as known, he had no family here. He seems to have had no liking for public office, but he was active in the business affairs of Davidsonville and the county. His place of residence was near Pocahontas, where he is buried. DeMunn township, in which Pocahontas is situated, was named in his honor.
James Campbell was appointed the first sheriff of the county February,1817, and served until 1819 and was succeeded by Joseph Hardin, Jr., who served until 1825. A part of the duties of the sheriff was to collect the taxes. Sheriff Campbell made a bond, signed by himself, William Hese, Joseph Hardin and David Black, in the sum of $909.06, for that amount of taxes for the year 1816-1817. There were various kinds of taxes in those days, such as house tax, tavern license, merchant license, peddling license, ferry license, etc. There was no uniform system of levying and collecting taxes as there is now. With the officers mentioned in the last two paragraphs, the county government was launched early in April,1815. The act creating the county provided that the first circuit court should be held at the house of Solomon Hewitt, which was situated on the north bank of Spring river two or three miles up the river from the mouth of Eleven Point river. At that place there was a one-room log house, a story and a half high, then surrounded by a grove of walnut and locust trees, and there was a fine spring near by. There the court was held in April, 1815, Judge Richard Thomas of the Southern Circuit of Missouri presiding. If there were any jurors, their names are not recorded in this county. It is said that this was the first regular court held in Arkansas, which was Missouri then. The most important business transacted by the court was the appointment of a "`Court House and Jail Commission", charged with the business of selecting and buying a site for the county seat. The Commission war, composed of Lewis DeMunn, William Hix, Solomon Hewitt, Andrew Criswell, Isaac Kelly, Morris Moore, Adam Richie and Joseph Hardin. It made its report in favor of the town of Lawrence. How the site was secured has been stated elsewhere in this narrative.
The court appointed two other commissions, one to "lay out and mark a road from the town of Lawrence in the direction of the Post of Arkansas to the line of Arkansas county;" the other to "lay out and mark a road from the town of Lawrence to the mouth of the North fork of White river." No record has been found of the opening of these roads, but it is believed that the two branches of the Military Road previously mentioned were the roads here mentioned. The site chosen for the county seat was a beautiful one on the west bank of Black river about three miles up the river from the mouth of Spring river. It is on the brow of a low hill which slopes gently down to the river about three hundred yards away. The town site was laid off in the form of a square of nine blocks, three each way, of six lots each. The center block was reserved for public square, in which was built the courthouse and jail. The court house was thirty by thirty-five feet, built of brick and two stories high (so stated C. L. Freeman in his account of the place written about fifty years ago). The lower floor was made of eight-inch square brick tile. A few of them have been preserved. The jail was built on the northwest corner of the square, of hewn logs on a stone foundation. The only sign left of these buildings is a slight elevation of earth and small pieces of brick where the court house stood. An elm tree more than a foot in diameter grew up in the northwest corner of the foundation and has been killed by digging under it to get the bricks held by its roots. A casual observation would hardly discover the site.
The land between the town and the river was reserved for public use and was called "The Common." On it were a blacksmith shop and a public well. The well is still in good state of preservation but in need of cleaning out. The entire site is now overgrown with trees, large and small. Some of the largest are more than two feet and a half in diameter. They are probably part of the original forest. If those old trees could talk, what a story they could tell! As one views this quiet, secluded place it is hard to realize that one is standing on the spot where a little more than a hundred years ago stood the metropolis of Arkansas.
The history of the now-extinct town of Davidsonville is a medley of fact and fiction, tradition and written record, and is cloaked in more or less mystery, which enhances its interest. However, it did not grow into a thriving town and disappear into oblivion because of any mysterious influence. Its fate was the natural result of environment and circumstances. How and when and by whom the place was first settled has already been told elsewhere in this article. It was named in honor of John Davidson, who, it is said, came from Tennessee to the place prior to 1815 in search of the murderer of his father and liked the place so well that he located there permanently. He afterward represented the county in the legislature of Missouri Territory.
For several years Davidsonville had no competition and, with its well-stocked , stores with goods from far-away markets, up-to-date shops of various kinds, taverns for the accommodation of travelers, comfortable homes, its first post office (1817) and United States Office (1820), and the county seat, it was a thriving town, second to none in the state; but fate turned against it not luck or anything mysterious--only natural environment and circumstances. In the first place, it was doomed by its situation, hemmed in as it was by the three rivers on three of its sides, so that in times of flush waters in those streams it was difficult of access except from the north. That condition caused the Military Road to by-pass it to the north to easy crossings on Eleven Point and Spring rivers. That gave the town of Jackson a chance to spring up and grow at Davidsonville's expense, on that road a few miles to the northwest. Also the new town of Batesville, fifty miles to the southwest, was growing rapidly at the expense of Davidsonville. These two towns got Davidsonville's trade territory and several of its moat substantial citizens. These were staggering blows, but the knock-out blows came in 1829, when the county seat was lost to Jackson, and the United States Land Office to Batesville; and, as if that were not disaster enough, in the same year a terrible epidemic, probably cholera, visiting the town and almost depopulated it (so says tradition). The few who escaped the disease made haste to leave. It is related that the houses of the town were burned as a precaution against an outbreak of the disease in the future. Thus died Davidsonville, where were made pages of unrecorded and unknown history.
On March 3,1819, Congress passed, and President Monroe signed, the Act that created the Territory of Arkansas out of the southern part of Missouri Territory, and Lawrence county thereby became Lawrence county, Arkansas Territory, instead of Missouri Territory, as it had been for four years. This event is the ending of the first period of Lawrence county history and the beginning of the second, and it is the end of this narrative.
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