Headshot courtesy of Sarah Wittenburg
Author: Tommy Medford | Major: History | Semester: Spring 2023
Hello! My name is Tommy Medford, and I am a rising senior from Conway, Arkansas majoring in History here at the University of Arkansas, with minors in Political Science, Spanish, and Global Studies. My honors thesis explores land ownership on the nearby Buffalo River in the period after dams proposed by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s were prevented from being built. When conservationists successfully pushed for national river status, many landowners were dispossessed of their generational property by the National Park Service (NPS) when the park was established. In my research, I hope to examine the landowner’s perspective. My thesis mentor is Dr. Jared Phillips of International and Global Studies. In the future, I hope to expand this study at the graduate level; I was recently accepted to the History Department’s 4+1 program here at the university. Beyond that, I will likely pursue a career in education, public history, or outdoor recreation.
As is typical for students of History, I had a variety of potential topics in the back of my mind as I entered junior year. My notes app on my phone reflected that I had done basically no narrowing down – but I had to figure it out soon. I had taken a public history class the previous semester, and I learned on a visit to Special Collections that we had the papers of Dr. Neil Compton, a physician who founded a conservation group called the Ozark Society which pushed for the national river. Given my love for nature, I thought that this might something worth exploring in a thesis.
Honors History students are required to take a methods class, which I took with Dr. Jeannie Whayne. When we first started discussing our topics, I relayed my very loose notion that the creation of the Buffalo National River might be an option. Dr. Whayne was quick to support me in this, and put me in touch with her colleague Dr. Patrick Williams, as she thought his knowledge of political history in the state might have been of some use to me. He informed me that there was some potential to delve into the other side of the park’s creation, which was the fact that many people had been removed from their land, and were not too keen about it. But he thought I might find greater success chatting with Dr. Jared Phillips, who I was coincidentally taking a Retro Readings course on the Ozarks with at that time. Dr. Phillips was a great help, and agreed to be my thesis mentor. It really was as easy as reaching out.
In the coming weeks I learned, thanks to Dr. Phillips’ knowledge, that the dominant historiography of the topic was already written in a lengthy piece by Dr. Compton, whose book obviously leaned into his group’s activism rather than the more fleshed-out version of events that includes landowners. So, the more worthy historical pursuit would be to explore how landowners came to be dispossessed from their land, as there are virtually no scholarly approaches to the topic. It has been fascinating so far. The chance to tell one group’s story and do justice to their nuanced stance, but avoid picking a side, is the essence of history to me.
That semester, I had the opportunity in my methods class to explore various approaches to history through the lens of my own topic. During this time, I explored relevant primary sources and came upon some congressional records which had statements from landowners and their representatives, including an alternative plan entitled the “Pastoral River Plan.” These efforts in congress in the late 1960s and early 1970s represent the key features of the landowner argument, which espoused that the Buffalo River had been pastoral for some time, and was not the pristine natural space that conservationists asserted it to be. People had been settled on the land for over a hundred years, working the land and earning their living. In their plan, landowners demonstrated that they, too, had a notion of conservation. Their relationship with the landscape cared for its longevity and was amicable with recreators. Other primary sources have related this second aspect, notably the story of “Granny” Henderson, whose cabin can still be visited today. I visited it in November. Its dilapidated state reflects the unfortunate irony of the events that unfolded, in which conservationists pushed for a wilderness area on the basis of the value of spaces untrammeled by humans, yet her cabin remains, a vestige of decades of life and memories unmaintained by the National Park Service.
This semester, I have learned about a buyback effort in the 1980s by the NPS that I hope to explore further. I also hope to compare this dispossession case study to examples in Appalachia, including the creation of Shenandoah National Park, and landowner activism in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I had the privilege of exploring my topic in a paper in my Environmental Ethics class, which was a great opportunity. My next step is to reach out to subjects for oral history interviews, which I hope to complete this summer before beginning archival work this fall. Dispossessed landowners and their families will be of great use in this study. I will defend in spring of 2024. I hope that my thesis might provide an interesting take on what we can do better in the future when it comes to land use questions. I appreciate the Honors College for awarding me this research grant, and I am indebted to Dr. Phillips for being so willing to discuss the process (and for lending me a fat stack of books I need to get cracking on).