NEWS ARTICLES

Clark County, Arkansas Genealogy Trails

CLARK NEWS TIDBITS

QUICKSILVER RUSH


--Mr. J. T. Golden has just finished a steam saw and grist-mill two miles northwest of Arkadelphia.  We are pleased to note such substantial improvements.

--Arkadelphia was flooded with people from the country one day last week, who came to town to see a circus that didn't arrive.  Someone has circulated the report in which there was no truth.
--The Ouachita Commercial is agitating the project, now on foot, of establishing a daily line of four-horse coaches from Arkadelphia, by way of Murfreesboro, Center Point, Locksburg, Ultima, Thule and Doaksville to Boggy Depot on the Missouri, Kansas and Texas railroad.
--The depot building at Arkadelphia is completed and is a very creditable building.  Meals will be served in the same on and after the 4th.
--A fine two-story brick hotel is going up near the depot at Arkadelphia.
--The Commercial thinks a dairy in the vicinity of Arkadelphia would pay well.
--The Arkadelphia Standard will appear this week enlarged and otherwise improved.  Source:  LITTLE ROCK DAILY REPUBLICAN, Sept. 2, 1873, contributed by Frances Cooley.

QUICKSILVER RUSH--To a German geologist named Norton who was traveling through southwest Arkansas lately, Farmer J. L. Cox of Graysonia showed a hunk of red rock. "Cinna-bar," explained the geologist. "Put it in a fire pot. It will run quicksilver." That is one version of the start of a current rush to mine mercury in the Ozarks. Another version is that railroad laborers exposed a valuable vein of cinnabar near Amity when they blasted out some sandstone riprap.
No matter how the lodes were discovered, southwest Arkansas was booming in minor key last week. A lumber company at Graysonia, which had finished clearing all the available timber in the district and was about to move, turned hands loose at mining cinnabar and transformed its sawmill to a mercury refining plant. Amity also has a mine and refinery. Murfreesboro is another centre. All around farmers are melting red rocks. About 1000 strangers are in the neighborhood. They want mining rights and whiskey, raising a pretty problem for the hearth-tenders up the creeks--whether to distill moonshine or quicksilver.
Raw mercury fetches $1.00 a pound, but evil accompanies the wealth. Quicksilver is a fickle metal. It is poisonous and those who work with it are usually affected. The pure metal may be absorbed by the skin or the vapors inhaled. Quicksilver helped Joseph Priestley discover oxygen. Besides its familiar uses--gold and silver amalgams to fill teeth; filling for thermometers and ultraviolet ray lamps--it goes into explosives and drugs.  Source: Excerpts from TIME Magazine, May 2, 1932.

 

2006 Arkansas Genealogy Trails

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