5. Civil War

Whether or not the Davises left Mississippi for Arkansas in 1859 to escape the coming civil war, the war found them. Robert Davis was too old to fight, and initially he profited. He was a tailor, and made lots of uniforms for Confederate officers. In 1864, two of Robert and Margaret’s sons, James and Billy, joined the  Confederate army, fighting in the West. James, 23, survived the war. Billy, 17, never returned. A family Bible notes “Billy Davis – went in the Missouri raid. Was lost. Time of death not known.” 

Years later, Margaret said “never a foot fell on the portal night or day but that I thought, ‘Oh, maybe it is Billy come home.’” Hattie Bell writes that Margaret “read in a newspaper of a Confederate soldier evidently suffering from amnesia, wandering from place to place asking ‘Who am I?’ She wrote and inquired, but it was not her Billy.”

The war went right past Sarah Storey’s door in 1864, as Union forces marched through northern Mississippi on their way to Atlanta, on a road that much later was named Nathan Bedford Forrest Highway. It had rained the night before and Fryar’s Bottom, as it was then known, was a muddy mess. The Yankees took pickaxes to the Wiers Chapel church, using the boards to lay over the mud. The federals met Forrest’s Confederate cavalry in the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads just down the road on June 10. The church was later rebuilt, with the help of $740 from a federal program set up after the war to help repair damage done by Union troops.

The biggest threat to Arkansas families was from soldiers of both sides who had been ordered to find the supplies they needed from the countryside through which they travelled. Yankee soldiers raided Allie Coleman’s grandfather’s farm, taking his best saddle horse and leaving down a sickly, broken-down pony. Allie, 12 years old, had begged her grandfather to let her keep the pony. She named her Jenny, and nursed her back to health.

Little Allie – we’ll hear more about her later – rode Jenny to school in Monticello on May 24, 1865, despite rumors that Yankee soldiers were in the area. They got to Mrs. Montgomery’s house, where they usually left the pony, and found the town full of soldiers foraging for anything they could take. When the soldiers came to Mrs. Montgomery’s, Hattie Bell writes, “rough, uncouth men entered her house, helped themselves to any food they found, and what they didn’t eat they handled with dirty hands and made it unfit for use.”

Then they saw the pony tied up in the yard and went to take it. But Allie clung to Jenny with all her might, she later told her daughter Hattie Bell, “saying ‘This is my pony. You can’t take her, no no no.’ The man cursed and called her ‘little red headed rebel.’ At length the man gave in, took his bridle and saddle and walked away.”