FEATURE
Recognizing All of the People Who Made the Territorial Courthouse Possible
BEHIND THE ARTICLE
The historic courthouse in May as reenactors set up tents on site for the annual Pioneer Days event. Photo by the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism, Historic Preservation Division.
The 1829 Jacob Wolf House Historic Site in Norfork, Arkansas, was the first territorial courthouse of then Izard County. It is 195 years old and still stands today where it was built. The other historic structure on the site is the 1832 John Wolf cabin, his younger brother’s cabin, which was moved to the site to keep it from being demolished. Two hundred years ago, Norfork was an upstart community known as Liberty in Arkansas Territory. It rested at the edge of United States expansion, on what some considered the frontier while others might see it as the edge of colonial expansion into the lands of the Native peoples. Jacob Wolf was instrumental in moving that community forwards. He petitioned the territorial government to let him build a courthouse at the strategic location of the confluence of the White and North Fork rivers, which was a center for travel, trade, and commerce.
When the territorial government approved his petition, Jacob Wolf gathered men together for what was called a “log raising” or the building of a structure made of the logs which had already been cut and cured through an air drying technique for six to twelve months. Wolf’s land was on the east side of White River, where the white people lived with some enslaved African Americans. The oldest men on the east side of White River were veterans of the Revolutionary War, and the younger men were veterans of the War of 1812. The men on the west side of White River were from different Native American tribes. All of these men were veterans of different wars between Native Americans and white settlers. But in Liberty, for a time, they put their differences aside and tried to make this new community work.
Sunrise over the Ozark Mountains, looking southeast. Undisturbed by the ravages of modern development, much of the Ozark wilderness looks as it did in the early 1800s. Photo by Ava Collopy.
In the early 1800s, in North America and particularly in settler communities, people were raised within a rigid gender role structure. (For this area, for example, there are no surviving historical records which suggest that any of the people living as men or living as women were not both raised as, respectively, males and females.) Certain work was rigidly defined as “men’s work” and other work was rigidly defined as “women’s work.” The only known exception to this was when men had to go on long trips, for example for hunting, and would leave the women at home for extended periods of time. In these cases, unless the women had older teenage sons, they would often have to do some work that was defined in this time as “men’s work,” for example, shooting birds out of the sky to provide food for their family. But behavior such as that was only borne out of necessity and was not generally encouraged.
There would have been great excitement in the building of a courthouse, of making Liberty an important place and having a building which would, for the white men, represent the new
Constitutional rights that these white men on the east side of this community had in this new country, the United States. Some Native Americans might also have found it useful because if Liberty became a bigger town, this increased traffic would be good for trade.
We don’t have a record of exactly what men helped Jacob Wolf, but based on what historical documentation we do have, it is an educated guess to say members of the Wolf and closely associated Adams family probably helped him, as well as some Delaware Indians he traded with, and, most likely, some or all of the African-American men that were enslaved people legally in his ownership. We know from bore drilling and carbon dating that the logs had been stockpiled for a few years, but the erecting of the actual building was done very quickly.
But what if, instead, the men had had to spend that morning and that week milking the cows, serving breakfast, feeding the children, washing the dishes, tending the cattle, tending the garden, mending torn clothes, using a spinning wheel to make cotton fabrics for bedding or clothes?
Domestic chores were extremely time and labor intensive in the early 1800s, more so than they are in modern, developed countries today. The people who did the domestic chores were women and enslaved African American people. Take one example: the work it took to make and maintain the fabric for bedding and clothes. Many women had spinning wheels to weave cotton balls into fabric. It took many hours to weave a sheet of cotton. Take one single bed sheet for example. Picture it, think about its size and feel in your hands, and think about the process required to have the fabric tightly spun together. How many hours do you think it took to make one single bed sheet?
In truth, it would vary depending on the woman’s skill, how much time she had to spin fabric, and how often she had to interrupt her spinning to tend to various other chores. Jacob Wolf’s wife, not having to cook meals because the enslaved women her husband legally owned usually did, might have had more time to weave fabric, assuming the enslaved people weren’t also weaving her fabric for her. John Wolf’s wife, however, would have done all of the chores as John Wolf, a traveling Baptist minister, didn’t have enough money to own any people as slaves. The majority of families on this edge of U.S. expansion did not have much money.
In any event, it took many hours to weave one piece of cotton fabric. And this is just one bed sheet. If, like John Wolf’s wife, you have yourself, a husband, and ten children, imagine how much bedding you might have to make. How many pieces of clothing might you have to make, spinning the fabric with your spinning wheel, then sewing the fabric together by hand with your sewing kit? And once that was done, how often would you have to wash all of the bedding and clothes for your family by hand?
The author in period clothes for the Pioneer Days annual event. I am holding a chalkboard and bible, demonstrating the fact that women were the teachers of their families on the U.S. colonial frontier before school houses were built. Photo by Ava Collopy.
The jury room set up as it would have been in 1829, with period accurate furniture. Juries were smaller in this time and were white men with a good reputation hand-picked by the judge from the local community. It was rare for a woman to be in the courthouse. Photo by the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism, Historic Preservation Division.
Washing the clothes and bedding was no small undertaking either, it meant packing up all the fabric items and walking them down to White River. It is the 1830s and you are on the U.S. frontier; you have no indoor plumbing, no water faucets, and—unlike in my grandmother’s day in the 1950s—no large metal wash basins. All metal has to be shipped up White River by keelboat or paddle wheel steamship, and it is very expensive. And then you’d have to get the town blacksmith—in this case Jacob Wolf—to work the metal for you.
You have to wash all of these fabric items by hand, then carry them all back up a hill. They are all heavy with water, and you might get very wet, the damp clinging in your clothes and on your skin for hours. You cannot strip down to carry the clothes as a good Christian woman keeps her body covered, from bonnet to long skirt. Otherwise you need to take an animal with you, brush off its back, and hope the animal doesn’t buck and throw your freshly washed fabrics on the ground or in the mud. Then you have to hang them all out to dry on ropes, pinning them up one by one. Then you have to keep track of how long they’ve been hanging out to dry and if it looks like it’s going to rain. Then take all the fabric items back indoors and put them away, sewing—by hand—anything that’s gotten torn.
And all this and your other chores while wearing a long skirt that covers everything including your ankles. And for much of this you are pregnant or breastfeeding as well, and cannot under any circumstances show your breasts outside of the home, and have about a 50% chance of dying in childbirth. Childbirth was extremely dangerous before modern medicine in the developed world. There is no baby formula and there are no hospitals on the U.S. frontier. And that’s just the work for the fabric items. That’s not even half of the work you do!
And then, if you are a white woman and can therefore possibly read and write, you are your family’s school teacher as well. There are no schools on the U.S. frontier. You teach your children reading, writing, arithmetic, and religious studies. And it is your job to keep your husband happy and do anything and everything he says. And if he is physically or otherwise abusive, it doesn’t matter because as a woman you have no legal rights. You are your father’s property until you are your husband’s property.
The main courtroom as it would have been set up in 1829, with period accurate furniture. Photo by the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism, Historic Preservation Division.
The John Wolf Cabin sits behind the historic courthouse building. It is Jacob’s younger brother’s cabin and is indicative of typical cabins on the frontier of U.S. expansion; one room downstairs with a smaller room behind it and one upstairs room for a married couple and their ten children. Photo by the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism, Historic Preservation Division.
So what if men like Jacob Wolf, the father of the town of Liberty, Arkansas, who built a courthouse that put the United States’ Founding Fathers’ vision of a society where some citizens had rights, had had to do all of the domestic chores the women and the enslaved people did?
What if the Founding Fathers of this nation had had to do all of their own domestic chores? What if George Washington had not had as strong and reliable a wife as Martha to keep his farm running? What if he hadn’t inherited enslaved people to work his farm? Would he have even been able to focus on winning the Revolutionary War if he had not had such a reliable support team that he didn’t have to worry about how his farm was doing while he was away?
When I give a program for visitors on this subject, it is at this point that I ask, “By show of hands, how many of you think he would not have been able to accomplish what he did without his support team?” And all hands raise.
Women were the heart and backbone of the advancement of U.S. civilization. And enslaved people were the breaking backbone of this society’s advancement. Throughout Western history, white men were only free to do the important work they did building Western civilization because women and enslaved people were supporting everything they did by taking care of all the many domestic chores and the field work. Arguably, no great man in history could have been great without the women, and, depending on time, place, and if he had a lot of money, the enslaved people he legally owned, as we say, “keeping the home fires burning.”
So, the next time someone talks about a great man in history, I do not suggest we downplay his accomplishments, because people have built what has come since then on his work. As an example, the United States’ Founding Fathers gave white men voting rights, and that first, limited granting of voting rights helped provide a groundwork that the U.S. built later rights movements on so that eventually non-white men, and later women, and later non-white women had voting rights: rights all U.S. citizens of age now have, although some still struggle to have full access to their voting rights as citizens.
But may I suggest that you kindly point out to whoever is telling that man’s story that there was a supporting cast of women, and people of color, that helped him be freed up to accomplish the great things he did? And may I suggest that, moving forwards, we learn to appreciate and include everyone’s contributions to the advancement of voting rights for all adults and other forms of progress around the world? For even today, the people who are the most famous around the world—actors, politicians, athletes—are only able to have the time and energy to do what they are famous for because of the people who support them by doing their domestic chores and supporting them in many other ways.
Throughout much of U.S. American history, only certain historical figures’ stories were told. This emphasis on the achievement of white men was a way of both appreciating their accomplishments and undermining the contributions of others. Moving forward, let’s tell our stories not with the agenda to only value some of our society’s members, but with the mindset to appreciate everyone’s contributions if they supported our most famous members in contributing to the betterment of one’s society.
Sunrise over the Ozarks; view from an Airbnb stay near Mountain View, Arkansas. Photo by Mika Altenberger.
Visitors come to walk into this historic scene: the 195-year-old courthouse, professionally restored, sits on the last remaining two acres of the original township of Liberty, Arkansas. Photo by the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism, Historic Preservation Division.
