Listing Through Life

At the start of the day, the pleasant woman at the Clinton Museum Store recommended that we take the trolley all the way down to the Old State House Museum. We decided to walk, which turned out fine because we discovered “all the way” meant four blocks. We walked all over downtown Little Rock during the day and we kept seeing the trolleys running about.

After we toured the Historic Arkansas Museum in the afternoon, we decided to take the trolley back to our car. It was still only four blocks, but how often do you get a chance to ride a trolley. We waited at the stop for about 10 minutes (which was just about as long as it would have taken us to walk back to our car). It cost us $1.00 each.

We had the car to ourselves. The driver was a nice guy who greeted us warmly. As we began moving, we discovered he was also a tour guide. He gave us a running commentary on the buildings we passed and other interesting stuff.

We reached the west end of the line and turned back toward our destination. I asked the driver which stop was closest to our parking lot. He pointed to another trolley visible in the distance, but he also told me it would take 30 minutes to get there.

It turns out that the trolley route crossed the Main Street Bridge and makes a loop around North Little Rock before crossing back over and heading where we wanted to go. We decided to stay aboard and enjoy the cheap, personal tour.

It was just a spontaneous end-of-the-day decision, but it turned out to be the highlight of the day.

I visited this place with my parents when I was about 12 and again with my wife and mother-in-law when I was 24 or so. It was time to visit again. Since my last visit, they’ve constructed a huge modern building on the lot that overwhelms the historic buildings and serves as a history museum. It’s filled with old weapons and old chairs, some of which were interesting but few of which had much to do with Arkansas history.

We were on our own in the museum but had to take a guided tour of the old houses. The woman who ushered us around was wearing a scarf that kept slipping off her shoulder. During the 45 minutes or so that we were with her, she must have flipped it back up 50 times. I wanted to yank on the short end and adjust it so it would stay in place, but I resisted the urge. The woman had a sense of humor and got enthusiastic whenever her spiel was leading up to one of her jokes, but most of the time she seemed rather bored with the whole thing.

What I like about these buildings is that they are authentic and on their original sites. The first one we toured is the Hinderliter Grog Shop, a tavern built in 1826 and which is the oldest surviving building in Little Rock.

Here’s what it looked like inside.

Here’s our guide (with her scarf in the process of slipping yet again) in the bar room.

We walked over to the next building, the Brownlee House, built in the 1840s by a stonemason who came to town to build the State House. Surprisingly, our guide’s scarf has slipped off her shoulder.

Inside, a woman was dressed as one of the Brownlee’s slaves from the 1850s. She gave us a half hour talk on the life of a slave, complete with singing and dancing. My wife found it interesting. I got a bigger kick out of watching our guide trying to contain her boredom as she fiddled with her scarf, got up to look out the windows, checked her watch, stared at the ceiling …

We went in one other building, the McVicar house built in the 1840s by the head of the Arkansas penitentiary. Our guide was thoroughly bored by this time, so we didn’t stay long.

I learned something recently. There is a little rock after which the city of Little Rock was named. (Well, actually, it was named by the French, so it was called La Petite Roche.) It was the first rock outcropping along the banks of the Arkansas River upstream from the Mississippi River.

As soon as I found this out, I determined to find it and photograph it. It turned out not to be all that easy. The rock was used as the foundation for one end of Junction Bridge. Junction Bridge is being converted into a pedestrian/bicycle bridge and the entire area leading up to it is under construction and blocked off. My wife and I refused to give up. We walked back and forth until we found a place where we could get down to the shore and walk back toward the bridge. A display in a nearby shelter included a photo of the rock, so we knew what we were looking for.

We walked out on a cement embankment and — there it was!

Yep. That’s it. Right there in the center foreground. That’s “the” Little Rock. Exciting, no? I can’t imagine why the city doesn’t publicize it more.

After our walk on the bridge, we drove to downtown Little Rock and parked by the William J. Clinton Presidential Library. I gave my wife the option of touring the library or the historic sites downtown. She opted for the historic sites, but we got a heavy dosage of Clintons anyway.

Our first stop was the Clinton Museum Store. It’s chock full of books about Clinton, photos of Clinton, buttons, pins and magnets about Clinton … We bought Bill and Hillary cookie cutters for some friends of ours and a “I miss Bill” sticker that somehow ended up on my father-in-law’s bedroom mirror. As we were purchasing these items, I asked the guy at the checkout counter where the nearest public bathrooms were. He told us to follow him. He led us through the store to a door that said, “Authorized Personnel Only.” He guided us through the door into a large warehouse of items sold in the store, then into a back office area full of people at desks. He pointed to the bathroom doors and left.

We were walking back out through the storeroom when we were greeted by another woman who asked us where we were from. When we said Chicago, she immediately commented on how cold it was up north and how we probably think it was a nice day in Little Rock but that she thought it was freezing. (It got up into the low 50s.) We had variations on this conversation about eight times before the day was over. I asked the woman how to get to the Old State House Museum. She led us outside and pointed down the street, but she said it was much to far to walk — at least 12 blocks — and recommended that we take the trolley.

Twelve blocks, in Chicago terms, is a mile and a half. We’re walkers, and even in my weakened condition due to my ulcer, it didn’t sound like much. We set off. It turned out it wasn’t much — three or four blocks down we happened upon the Old State House Museum.

Construction on the building began in 1833 and was completed in 1842. It’s the oldest surviving state capitol west of the Mississippi. Admission was free, which made it doubly attractive to us.

After having the “How cold is it in Chicago? We think it’s cold here” conversation with the clerks at the desk, we set off on our self-guided tour. All the displays are very-impressively done, but most of them weren’t all that interesting. I can’t even imagine a thorough-going fan of Arkansas history being overly excited by a collection of the gowns worn by all the governors’ wives at their husbands’ inaugurations. There were displays on the various gubernatorial (why “guber…”) campaigns and a lot of portraits of, and furniture belonging to, people we’d never heard of. The most impressive room was the 1836 House of Representatives Chamber. A man in period costume told us about a knife fight in the early days during which one representative killed another. It was also the room in which the vote for Arkansas’s secession during the Civil War took place.

Bill Clinton announced his candidacy for President on the steps of this building in both 1992 and 1996. A dress that Hillary wore during the first speech is on display.

It seemed like every room contained at least one of Hillary’s gowns or a pair of her shoes or something. The woman certainly has an enthusiastic sense of her own importance. A pair of Bill’s shoes was also on display — ones he wore on the 1992 campaign trail. I was proud to discover they were New Balance, the same brand I wear. This is, perhaps, the only thing he and I have in common.

It would take Evelyn Wood a week to read all the displays in the museum. We were in and out within an hour, which gives you an idea of how thorough we were. Still, there were some amusing artifacts and it was free, so we had no regrets.

On the final day of our Arkansas vacation, my wife and I decided to head into Little Rock and see what we could find to do while spending as little money as possible.

Our first stop was this bridge, popularly known as the “Big Dam Bridge.” It’s another example of your tax dollars at work, as some of the $12.5 million it took to build it came from the federal government. It’s part of a 14-mile loop trail that runs along both shores of the Arkansas River through Little Rock and North Little Rock. The bridge opened in September, 2006 and is the longest pedestrian and bicycle bridge in the world built specifically for that purpose. (There’s a longer one in St. Louis that was originally a railroad bridge.) It’s 4,226 feet long and, at it’s peak, 90 feet above the river. The bridge crosses the Murray Lock and Dam, which was not constructed to accommodate a bridge. Several three-ton chunks of cement were cut out of the dam to fit the bridge supports. These wedge-shaped chunks are lined up along the trail on both sides of the bridge as though they actually mean something. You can see two of them in the top pan, taken from the north end.

The local authorities responsible for the bridge are very proud of themselves. On the bridge’s web site, there’s an entire page devoted to how the name “Big Dam Bridge” was coined. On the brochure about the trail, there’s this quote by Pulaski County Judge Buddy Villines — “This bridge, like the very early bridges, connects people and places. It connects us in a very human way. We will bring our families and friends here, and we will meet other families and make new friends.”

This pan was taken about a third of the way across. That’s the Interstate 430 bridge in the distance, and behind it the conical-shaped Pinnacle Mountain, an old volcanic cone that is now a state park.

We didn’t meet any other families or make any friends. During the time it took us to walk over and back, I think we saw two hikers and one bike rider. It was around 30 degrees, and a steady wind was whipping down the river, but we were dressed for it.

Here’s a pan from the south end, with the lock in the foreground.

A tugboat was pushing a string of barges upriver through the lock when we were on the bridge.

The string was so long that it had to be locked through in two sections. The second section had just been raised to the upriver level, and these bargemen were fastening the sections together with cables.

In the time it took us to walk down the south incline of the bridge and back, the tugboat had pushed the barges almost to the highway bridge. This shot gives a better look at Pinnacle Mountain.

Another tugboat was docked along the bank near the lock.

I’m pretty sure the bridge isn’t worth $12.5 million, but it was a nice place for a mile-and-a-half walk.