[Photography] : [African-Americana] : [Missouriana] : [Arrow Rock, Missouri]: (1901)2 albumen print photographs. Each approximately 7” x 4 3/4” prints on matching 9” x 7” decorative card mounts. Each with a hand-written date to the upper corner of card verso: “9 July 1901.” Mild handling wear to prints and mounts. About very good still.

An evocative pair of original photographs documenting the immediate aftermath of a July 9, 1901 fire which devastated Arrow Rock, Missouri, a village of about 350 residents at the time, on the Missouri River in Saline County, an historically important place as a prominent Boonslick trading post and point of ferry service on the Santa Fe Trail, as well as longtime home of artist George Caleb Bingham.

Estimates suggest the fire destroyed most of the commercial district and it was covered at length in regional newspapers at the time, with the weekly Arrow Rock Statesman providing the most eloquent coverage we’ve been able to locate:

“Tuesday evening at about 9:30, fire broke out in J.W. Wheeler’s drug store, caused by a failing lamp. Almost instantly the whole inside of the room was a solid blaze, and it was impossible to enter the  room. The alarm was given and help came in abundance but with the means for fighting at their command it was impossible to extinguish or even check the fire in its mad disastrous career.  […] Every thing from Hains Bros. store to Jolin-Quicks restaurant, ten business houses, Chase’s dwelling and the negro hall was destroyed.” (July 12, 1901 ; pp.1)

Reference to the “negro hall” in this coverage, along with the evocative scene featuring a group of African-American men and children standing amid rubble, proves compelling given Arrow Rock’s majority Black population at the turn of the 20th Century. 

Arrow Rock has also been site of considerable historic preservation work. The J. Hutson Tavern (whose distinctive “City Hotel” sign we see at left edge of one photo here) was the first building in Missouri to be preserved with State funds and it remains open today as the oldest, continually operating restaurant west of the Mississippi. 

The town sees a thriving historical tourist trade and in recent decades it has been site of long-term archeological and anthropological studies on its 19th and early 20th Century African-American communities due to the efforts of Professor Timothy Baumann, Curator of Archaeology at McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Tennessee (and a Missouri native).  A mighty photographic record of a significant event in the history of Arrow Rock and poignant original glimpse at its African-American community at the turn of the 20th Century.