Pine Bluff is a city in Jefferson County, Arkansas, United States, and its county seat. The population was 41,253 at the 2020 census, making it the tenth-most populous city in Arkansas.
Pine Bluff is situated in the southeast section of the Arkansas Delta and straddles the Arkansas Timberlands region to its west. Its topography is flat with wide expanses of farmland, similar to other places in the Delta Lowlands. Pine Bluff has numerous creeks, streams, and bayous, including Bayou Bartholomew, the longest bayou in the world and the second most ecologically diverse stream in the United States. Large bodies of water include Lake Pine Bluff, Lake Langhofer (Slack Water Harbor), and the Arkansas River.
History
Indigenous Peoples, European Settlement and Quapaw Cession The area along the Arkansas River had been inhabited for thousands of years by indigenous peoples of various cultures. They used the river for transportation as did European settlers after them, and for fishing. By the time of encounter with Europeans, the historical Quapaw were the chief people in the area, having migrated from the Ohio River valley centuries before.
Records dating back to 1801 show that “fifty miles up the Arkansas River on the Bonne Reserve lived Joseph Bonne, Michael Bonne and other taxpayers named Bonne.” Joseph Bonne was interpreter for the United States government at the signing of the Quapaw Cession at St. Louis, Missouri, August 21, 1818.Arnold, Morris S. “Barthélémy Dit Charlot, a Colonial Arkansas Métis and Voyageur.” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, vol. 74, no. 1, Arkansas Historical Association, 2015, p. 12, JSTOR website Retrieved December 4, 2021. Joseph Bonne, also written as Bone, Bona, or Bon. Bonne had Quapaw, French, and Plains Apache ancestry.Arnold, Morris (Summer 2016). "The Métis People of Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Arkansas". Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association. 57 (3): 278–282 – via JSTOR
Due to a great flood in 1819, Bonne and his wife, Mary Imbeau, moved five miles upstream from the Bonne Reserve to the place later named Pine Bluff. This was the first bluff above the mouth of the river and was covered by towering pine trees, the eastern boundary of the coastal plain of South Arkansas.
Founding, Trail of Tears and the Antebellum Era (1832–1861) Bonne built a log cabin with a lean-to which served as his home... as well as a tavern with lodging accommodations for travelers. The settlement was officially named “The Town of Pine Bluff” by the county court on October 16, 1832.
With its proximity to the Arkansas River, the town served as an inland port for steamboat travel and shipping. Steamboats provided the primary mode of transport, arriving from downriver ports such as New Orleans. From 1832 to 1838, Pine Bluff residents would see Native American migrants on the Trail of Tears waterway who were being forcibly removed by the United States Army from the Southeast to the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River.
From 1832 to 1858, the town was a station on the Trail of Tears for the Seminole and their slaves, who were forcibly removed from Florida Territory to the Indian Territory. They included the legendary Black Seminole leader John Horse, who arrived in the city via the steamboat Swan in 1842.
Civil War, Reconstruction and the Gilded Age (1861–1902) Pine Bluff was prospering by the outbreak of the Civil War; most of its wealth was based on the commodity crop of cotton. This was cultivated on large plantations by hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans throughout the state, but especially in the Delta. The city had one of the largest slave populations in the state by 1860, and Jefferson County, Arkansas was second in cotton production in the state.
When Federal forces occupied Little Rock, a group of Pine Bluff residents asked commanding Major General Frederick Steele to send Federal forces to occupy their town to protect them from bands of Confederate bushwhackers. Federal troops under Colonel Powell Clayton arrived September 17, 1863, and stayed until the war was over.
On October 25, 1863, Confederate cavalry, led by Brigadier-General John S. Marmaduke, attempted to expel Federal occupation forces commanded by Colonel Powell Clayton; but were defeated by a combined force of federal troops and freedmen (former slaves freed by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln's recent Emancipation Proclamation) near Jefferson Court-House. In the final year of the Civil War, the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry Regiment (composed primarily of escaped slaves from Arkansas and Missouri), was the first regiment of U.S. Colored Troops to see combat. It was dispatched to guard Pine Bluff and eventually mustered out there.
Because of the Federal forces, Pine Bluff attracted many refugees and freedmen after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in early 1863. The Federal troops set up a contraband camp there to house the runaway slaves and refugees behind Confederate lines. After the war, freed slaves worked with the American Missionary Association to start schools for the education of blacks, who had been prohibited from learning to read and write by southern laws. Both adults and children eagerly started learning. By September 1872, Professor Joseph C. Corbin opened the Branch Normal School of the Arkansas Industrial University, a historically black college. Founded as Arkansas's first black public college, today it is the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.
Pine Bluff and the region suffered lasting effects from defeat, the aftermath of war, and the trauma of slavery and exploitation. Recovery was slow at first. Construction of railroads improved access to markets, and with increased production of cotton as more plantations were reactivated, the economy began to recover. The first railroad reached Pine Bluff in December 1873. This same year Pine Bluff's first utility was formed when Pine Bluff Gas Company began furnishing manufactured gas from coke fuel for lighting purposes. The state's economy remained highly dependent on cotton and agriculture, which suffered a decline through the 19th century.
As personal fortunes increased from the 1870s onward, community leaders constructed large Victorian-style homes west of Main Street. Meanwhile, the Reconstruction era of the 1870s brought a stark mix of progress and challenge for African Americans. Most blacks joined the Republican Party, and several were elected in Pine Bluff to county offices and the state legislature for the first time in history. Several black-owned businesses were also opened, including banks, bars, barbershops, and other establishments. But in postwar violence in 1866, an altercation with whites ensued at a refugee camp, and 24 black men, women and children were found hanging from trees in one of the worst mass lynchings in U.S. history.
The rate of lynchings of black males was high across the South during this period of social tensions and white resistance to Reconstruction. Armistad Johnson was lynched in 1889, and John Kelly and Gulbert Harris in 1892 in front of the Jefferson County Courthouse, after a mob of hundreds rapidly escalated to thousands of whites vehemently demanding execution, despite Kelly's pleas of innocence and lack of trial. The angry mob eventually forced over his custody from an Officer adamantly attempting to deliver the suspect to the jail house, then the crowd watched enthusiastically as he was hung and riddled with bullets. That same year the state adopted a poll tax amendment that disenfranchised many African-American and poor white voters. The Election Law of 1891 had already made voting more difficult and also caused voter rolls to decrease. With the Democratic Party consolidating its power in what became a one-party state, the atmosphere was grim toward the end of the 19th century for many African Americans. Democrats imposed legal segregation and other Jim Crow laws.
Bishop Henry McNeal Turner's "Back to Africa" movement attracted numbers of local African-American residents who purchased tickets and/or sought information on emigration. Arkansas had 650 emigrants depart to the colony of Liberia in West Africa, more than from any other state in the United States. The majority of these emigrants came from the black-majority Jefferson, St. Francis, Pulaski, Pope, and Conway counties.Barnes, Kenneth C. Journey of Hope: The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. . Google Books. Retrieved June 6, 2014.
According to historian James Leslie, Pine Bluff entered its "Golden Era" in the 1880s. Cotton production and river commerce helped the city draw industries, public institutions and residents to the area, making it by 1890 the state's third-largest city. The first telephone system was placed in service March 31, 1883. Wiley Jones, a freedman who achieved wealth by his own business, built the first mule-drawn, street-car line in October 1886. The first light, power and water plant was completed in 1887; a more dependable light and water system was put in place in 1912. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, economic expansion was also fueled by the growing lumber industry in the region.
Early 20th century and the Great Depression (1902–1941) Situated on the Arkansas River, Pine Bluff depended on river traffic and trade. Community leaders were concerned that the main channel would leave the city. The United States Army Corps of Engineers built a levee opposite Pine Bluff to try to keep the river flowing by the city.
During a later flood, the main channel of the river moved away from the city, leaving a small oxbow lake (later expanded into Lake Pine Bluff). River traffic diminished, even as the river was a barrier separating one part of the county from the other. After many years of regional haggling, because the bond issue involved raised taxes, the county built the Free Bridge, which opened in 1914. For the first time, it united the county on a permanent basis.
African Americans in Pine Bluff were damaged by the state's disfranchisement in 1891–1892 and exclusion from the political system. But they continued to work for their rights; they joined activists in Little Rock and Hot Springs in a sustained boycott of streetcars, protesting passage in 1903 of the Segregated Streetcar Act, part of a series of Jim Crow laws passed by the white-dominated legislature. They did not achieve change then.John A. Kirk, "Civil Rights Movement (Twentieth Century)", Encyclopedia of Arkansas, 2015
Development in the city's business district grew rapidly. The Masonic Lodge, built by and for the African-American chapter in the city, was the tallest building in Pine Bluff when completed in 1904. The Hotel Pines, constructed in 1912, had an intricate marble interior and classical design, and was considered one of Arkansas' showcase hotels. The 1,500-seat Saenger Theater, built in 1924, was one of the largest such facilities in the state; it operated the state's largest pipe organ. When Dollarway Road was completed in 1914, it was the longest continuous stretch of concrete road in the United States. The first radio station (WOK) broadcast in Arkansas occurred in Pine Bluff on February 18, 1922.
Two natural disasters had devastating effects on the area's economy. The first was the Great Flood of 1927, a 100-year flood. Due to levee breaks, most of northern and southeastern Jefferson County were flooded. The severe drought of 1930 caused another failure of crops, adding to the problems of economic conditions during the Great Depression. Pine Bluff residents scrambled to survive. In 1930, two of the larger banks failed. During the 1933 Mississippi River flood, country singer Johnny Cash evacuated to Pine Bluff.