Region, Religion, and Competing Visions of Mountain Mission Education in the Ozarks

In the Ozark region of northwestern Arkansas, the hamlets of Kingston and Parthenon lie fewer than thirty miles from one another, separated by the rugged terrain of the Boston Mountains and the narrow Buffalo River Valley. In the 1920s, the journey from Kingston to Parthenon was an all-day undertaking, involving a combination of automobile and mule-drawn wagon travel. Located in adjacent counties, Kingston and Parthenon occupied one of the poorest and least literate sections of a comparatively poor and illiterate region. So poor and remote were the two hamlets, in fact, that both attracted the attention of philanthropic educators in the decade after World War I.

The home mission board of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) discovered the plight of Parthenon, in Newton County, to be “the most destitute field” in the state. The observation was an apt reference to the area’s financial status, but the true source of the county’s destitution, as far as the home mission board was concerned, was the almost complete absence of Southern Baptist congregations in this rugged cranny of the Ozarks. With assistance from elected county officials and the county superintendent of education, the superintendent of the home mission board’s Ozark Division of Mountain Mission Schools, Hugh D. Morton, convinced the citizens of Parthenon to donate thirty-five acres for a school site and to provide the money, materials, and labor for the erection of a two-story, native-stone building containing a two-hundred-seat auditorium and seven classrooms. Within a year of the school’s opening in the fall of 1920, local residents had completed on the campus of Newton County Academy a second building, a two-story, wood-frame girls’ dormitory.¹

The coeducational academy provided a remarkably thorough education for the fortunate youth of Parthenon and for the teenagers and pre-ministerial students who could scrape up the money to cover the modest tuition and boarding fees or who received one of the scholarships sponsored by Baptist churches and laypeople from several towns in Arkansas and Texas. As the home mission board intended, the school’s proselytizing teachers and the annual, weeklong revival services brought dozens of children and their parents into the Southern Baptist fold. Within two years Newton County Academy boasted an enrollment of 184 students, some of whom found themselves participating in one of the two literary societies on campus, competing in debates, and studying Latin, advanced mathematics, and other courses beyond the rudimentary subjects of the typical public, one-room school. In spite of the school’s popularity and its boon to church rolls, Newton County Academy, like the other Baptist mission schools in Arkansas, had closed its doors by the end of the 1920s, a product of Southern Baptists’ waning interest in mission schools, financial strains in the wake of the flood of 1927, and the spread of rural public high schools.²

Across the hills and hollows in Kingston, a different denomination came to town. In early 1917, just weeks before the United States’ entry into World War I, Warren H. Wilson, the director of the Department of Church and Country Life for the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA, colloquially known as the Northern Presbyterians), sent middle-aged Indiana minister Elmer J. Bouher to this remote location in the Kings River Valley, the site of an abandoned mission station. Bouher, who had been longing “to get out where there was no church, into a community that most needed ministering to,” found in Kingston the perfect laboratory in which to test his vision of rural rehabilitation.³ For Bouher and for many other white, native-born Protestants in the early twentieth century, the citizens of Kingston, “Anglo-Saxon to the core,” composed the ideal population for this experiment. In his dozen years living among the hill people, with “their feet deeply set in the traditional soil of their ancestors,” the tireless minister reopened the PCUSA church, established a Sunday school, lectured farmers on the latest progressive agricultural techniques, challenged moonshiners and bootleggers...