50 Fun Facts About Little Rock

Which 1939 Hollywood epic shows the Old Mill, a park landmark across the river from Little Rock, in its opening credits?

Gone with the Wind shows a mill that was only ever scenery. It was built in 1933 as a tourist attraction, with concrete sculpted to pass for old wood.

Which 1980s sitcom set in Atlanta used Little Rock's Villa Marre as the exterior of the Sugarbaker sisters' firm?

Designing Women borrowed a second Little Rock address too: the Arkansas Governor's Mansion appeared on screen as the home of Suzanne Sugarbaker.

Which World War II general was born at a Little Rock army arsenal whose last building is now a military museum?

Douglas MacArthur was born there in 1880 while his father, a Civil War Medal of Honor recipient, was posted to the barracks. The park around the museum now carries the family name.

Which US president sent 101st Airborne paratroopers to Little Rock in 1957 so nine Black students could enter school?

Dwight D. Eisenhower also took the 10,000-strong Arkansas National Guard under federal command, so troops who had been used to block the students ended up protecting them.

Which rock band was formed after Amy Lee and Ben Moody met as teenagers at a youth camp in Little Rock?

Evanescence started out playing acoustic sets in Little Rock bookstores and coffee houses. The album Fallen then sold more than four million copies in the US within a year.

TCBY, which opened its first shop in Little Rock in 1981, grew into a worldwide chain selling which dessert?

Frozen yogurt is said to have so surprised founder Frank Hickingbotham at a Dallas department store that his disbelief became the shop's first name. A rival's lawsuit in 1984 forced a change.

Which Tex-Mex appetizer, popularized in Arkansas in 1935, got its own world championship in Little Rock in 2010?

Cheese dip took off when restaurateur Blackie Donnelly swapped fresh Mexican queso for processed American cheese, which stays melted far longer on the table.

The Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock contains a full-scale replica of which famous White House room?

The Oval Office replica sits in a glass building that juts out over the river like an unfinished bridge, echoing the bridge metaphor of the 1996 re-election campaign.

Which stray tuxedo cat, adopted by the Clinton family in Little Rock in 1991, went on to live in the White House?

Socks chose his owners by jumping into Chelsea Clinton's arms outside her piano teacher's house. He never accepted Buddy the Labrador and retired with the president's secretary.

Little Rock's Esse museum tells the story of American women in the 1900s through which fashion accessory?

Handbags and the everyday things women carried inside them fill the Esse Purse Museum, whose name is the Latin verb meaning to be.

Which civil rights leader sat with the family of Ernest Green at his 1958 graduation from Little Rock Central High?

Martin Luther King Jr. was in Arkansas to give a college commencement speech in Pine Bluff, and joined the family to watch the school's first Black graduate collect his diploma.

Little Rock investment bank Stephens Inc. helped which future retail giant sell its first public shares in 1970?

Walmart raised just $4.95 million in that offering, selling 300,000 shares at $16.50 each while Sam Walton's discount chain was still a small Arkansas business.

Which 1968 Western novel by longtime Little Rock resident Charles Portis became a John Wayne film a year later?

True Grit gave John Wayne his Academy Award-winning role as the one-eyed lawman Rooster Cogburn. Portis stayed out of the spotlight in Little Rock until his death in 2020.

At which Little Rock landmark did Bill Clinton launch his first presidential run and hold both election-night parties?

The Old State House is the oldest surviving state capitol building west of the Mississippi River. Lawmakers left it for a new capitol in the early 1910s, and it is now a museum of Arkansas history.

With which weapon did the speaker of the Arkansas House kill a fellow lawmaker during an 1837 debate in Little Rock?

A Bowie knife ended an argument over bounties for wolf scalps after the speaker took a colleague's joke as a personal insult. A jury later found him not guilty of murder.

The 4,226-foot Big Dam Bridge across the river at Little Rock was built to carry which kind of traffic?

Walkers and cyclists owe the name to a county judge who vowed to get that dam bridge built, a pun he insisted referred only to the lock and dam it stands on.

Which member of the Little Rock Nine was photographed walking alone past a jeering crowd outside Central High in 1957?

Elizabeth Eckford arrived by herself because the meeting place was changed the night before and her family had no telephone, so the fifteen-year-old never got the message.

Little Rock charity Heifer International began in 1944 by shipping 17 dairy cows to poor families on which island?

Puerto Rico received cows named Faith, Hope and Charity, and each family had to promise its first female calf to another poor family, a rule the charity still applies.

Which Baseball Hall of Famer born in Little Rock won 16 straight Gold Gloves at third base for Baltimore?

Brooks Robinson fielded so cleanly that he was nicknamed the Human Vacuum Cleaner, and his glove work against Cincinnati made him the 1970 World Series MVP.

Which Arkansas governor used the National Guard in 1957 to keep nine Black students out of Little Rock Central High?

Orval Faubus went further the next year and shut the city's public high schools for the whole 1958-59 term, a stretch still known locally as the Lost Year.

Which Little Rock newspaper publisher, who mentored the nine students of 1957, now has a statue in the US Capitol?

Daisy Bates ran the Arkansas State Press with her husband, and their house was the students' daily pick-up and drop-off point. It is now a National Historic Landmark.

The domed capitol building in Little Rock, completed in 1915, stands on land previously occupied by which institution?

The state penitentiary sat on land a governor called too valuable for a prison, and 200 of its convicts were put to work on the new building to save money.

Which famous jewelry firm supplied the ten-foot bronze front doors of the Arkansas State Capitol in Little Rock?

The $10,000 doors, each four inches thick, came from Tiffany & Co. The domed building behind them stood in for the US Capitol in the 1986 TV drama Under Siege.

Little Rock has been world headquarters of the ATA since 1977, an organization devoted to teaching which martial art?

Taekwondo grandmaster Haeng Ung Lee moved his association from Omaha, Nebraska, saying the hills of central Arkansas reminded him of his Korean homeland.

The submarine USS Razorback, docked opposite Little Rock, is named not for the Arkansas mascot but for which sea animal?

A whale is the source: razorback is another name for the rorquals, the family of whales with grooved throats. The boat was in Tokyo Bay when Japan formally surrendered in 1945.

The retired cruiser USS Little Rock, the first Navy ship named for the Arkansas capital, is a museum ship in which city?

Buffalo received the ship in 1977 after a tow from Philadelphia through the St. Lawrence Seaway. She is the last surviving cruiser of the 27-ship Cleveland class.

Which department store chain, begun as a small-town Arkansas shop in 1938, keeps its headquarters in Little Rock?

Dillard's takes its name from founder William T. Dillard, who sold his first store in Nashville, Arkansas, in 1948 to move into a bigger department store in Texarkana.

Lorelei Lee, the showgirl from Little Rock, is the heroine of which musical filmed with Marilyn Monroe in 1953?

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes reached Broadway in 1949, where the part of the blonde from Arkansas introduced Carol Channing. Monroe took the role over for the film.

Which Little Rock-born guard won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers between 2000 and 2010?

Derek Fisher played for the University of Arkansas at Little Rock before the Lakers drafted him in 1996, then won three straight titles beside Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal.

The 1957 school crisis in Little Rock grew out of which 1954 Supreme Court ruling against segregated public schools?

Brown v. Board was tested again in 1958 in Cooper v. Aaron, a case from the same Little Rock dispute, when the justices ruled that every state is bound by the Court's decisions.

For covering the 1957 school crisis in Little Rock, the Arkansas Gazette and its editor won two of which awards?

Pulitzer Prizes went to the paper for public service and to editor Harry Ashmore for his editorials. Founded in 1819, the Gazette was the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi.

Which jazz trumpeter vowed to cancel a State Department tour of the Soviet Union in protest over Little Rock in 1957?

Louis Armstrong, who rarely spoke publicly about race, told a student reporter in North Dakota that he could not represent his government abroad while it was failing its own people.

Which actor born in Little Rock starred opposite Reese Witherspoon in the 2002 romantic comedy Sweet Home Alabama?

Josh Lucas had broken through a year earlier in A Beautiful Mind, and later played the young John Dutton in the television drama Yellowstone.

Which US president settled an 1874 armed standoff in Little Rock between rival claimants to the Arkansas governorship?

Ulysses S. Grant reluctantly sided with Elisha Baxter, and the settlement marked the end of Reconstruction in Arkansas. Democrats then held the governorship for more than 90 years.

Little Rock is the seat of a county named for which foreign-born general killed at Savannah in the American Revolution?

Casimir Pulaski, a Polish nobleman remembered as the father of American cavalry, was fatally hit by grapeshot while leading a mounted charge against the British.

Which retired general raised in Little Rock led NATO forces in the Kosovo War and ran for president in 2004?

Wesley Clark finished first in his West Point class and won a Rhodes Scholarship before a 34-year Army career that ended as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe.

Which peak northwest of Little Rock did early settlers call Mamelle, a French word for a breast-shaped hill?

Pinnacle Mountain anchors a state park of more than 2,000 acres. Its old name lives on, respelled, in Lake Maumelle, a reservoir that supplies the city's drinking water.

Which older settlement near the Mississippi did Little Rock replace as the territorial capital in 1821?

Arkansas Post began as a French trading station in 1686, but as settlers spread north and west of it the territory moved its capital upriver after only two years.

Which honor did President Bill Clinton present to each member of the Little Rock Nine in November 1999?

The Congressional Gold Medal is voted by lawmakers rather than chosen by the president: two-thirds of both the House and the Senate must co-sponsor each award.

Which Little Rock-born composer was the first Black woman to have her music performed by a major American orchestra?

Florence Price heard the Chicago Symphony play her Symphony in E minor in 1933. A large cache of her manuscripts turned up in 2009 in her abandoned summer home.

Little Rock native Max Aronson became the first cowboy star of silent films under which screen name?

Broncho Billy made his name in a long run of silent Western shorts for Essanay, the studio he co-founded. In 1958 he received a special Academy Award as a film pioneer.

Which 17-year-old was hanged in Little Rock in 1864 after Union soldiers found coded troop notes in his notebook?

David O. Dodd had recorded the strength and location of Union units in Morse code, and his execution made him known as the boy martyr of the Confederacy.

After Union troops took Little Rock in 1863, Arkansas's Confederate government settled in which Hempstead County town?

Washington remained the rebel capital until 1865 while a Unionist government sat in Little Rock. Sam Houston and Davy Crockett had passed through the town on their way to Texas.

Which memoir did Melba Pattillo Beals of the Little Rock Nine base partly on her teenage diaries?

Warriors Don't Cry appeared in 1994, nearly four decades after the events it describes. Beals followed it with a sequel, White Is a State of Mind.

Which name did land speculators briefly give the settlement of Little Rock in 1821 before the original name returned?

Arkopolis was the choice of claimants holding land certificates issued after the New Madrid earthquakes. Their claims were ruled invalid, and a compromise restored the old name.

Which Little Rock burial ground is nicknamed the Westminster Abbey of Arkansas for the state leaders buried there?

Mount Holly Cemetery holds a long roll of governors, senators, mayors and Confederate generals, along with the poet John Gould Fletcher and children's author Charlie May Simon.

Little Rock Air Force Base is the Pentagon's main training base for crews of which four-engine transport plane?

C-130 Hercules pilots, navigators, flight engineers and loadmasters from every branch of the military train there. The base itself sits in Jacksonville, about 17 miles from the city.

The western edge of Little Rock climbs into the foothills of which mountain range that stretches into Oklahoma?

The Ouachita Mountains begin right where the city's namesake outcrop stands: river travelers used the rock to mark the point where the flat Delta gives way to hill country.

Which Little Rock-born boxer ended Bernard Hopkins's ten-year reign as middleweight champion in 2005?

Jermain Taylor then won the rematch that December, which makes him the only boxer to have beaten Hopkins twice.

Which federal agency runs the visitor center opposite Little Rock Central High, a protected civil rights landmark?

The National Park Service has managed the site since 1998. Central High is the only fully functioning high school to have been made a National Historic Site.