Each room in the McClure-Highfill Home is a
complete wooden box--ceiling, floor, and walls. Inside each
"box" the interior surfaces were added. Thus, the interior
walls have four layers as each room’s walls consist of solid
wood with wallboard on the interior. The exterior walls have
five layers of building materials: bricks, wood sheeting,
insulation, another wooden wall (forming the "box"), and
finally wallboard. Ceilings and floors were also installed
over solid wood. Much of the lumber used to build these
"boxes" was from the dismantled Eaker house which originally
stood on the site.
Many of the home’s original features have
been preserved. The newel posts at the base of the basement
stairs are from the Eaker house and are original except for
the caps. Another feature preserved from the past is the
telephone nook, which is built into a wall of one of the main
floor halls. All the original mortise locks, escutcheons, and
glass doorknobs also remain in use. Although carpets are used
in some rooms of the home today, all the original wood floors
are in excellent condition; the floors on the main floor are
oak, and those on the top floor are pine.
Perhaps the most unique features of the home
are a result of Builder Alfred Thomas’ personal skills. During
construction, he hand carved designs on the wallboards and
ceilings throughout the house; his only tool was a small
carving knife. Most of the wall enhancements are fairly
simple, except for one room, the walls of which are carved in
nineteen arches. Most of the ceilings are simple; every
ceiling, however, is different. The ceilings in the dining
room, living room, front entrance hall, and the room with the
arched walls were quite elaborate. Three of these unique
ceilings and two of the more simple ones remain, as do the
arched walls.
The home’s heating system was very unusual in
this area at the time of construction. It is believed to be
Paragould’s first gravity system. The hot air moved throughout
the house in an elaborate ductwork system, which consisted of
mechanically controlled supply ducts to each room plus very
large return air ducts to move heavy cold air from the rooms
back to the furnace. Originally there was a coal-burning
furnace. Today the home has forced central gas heat and
electric air but still uses the original ductwork.
Greene County, Arkansas, had its origin in
the home of early pioneer Benjamin Crowley, after whom
Crowley’s Ridge was named. Mr. Crowley held a New Madrid
Certificate, a document that replaced Bounty Certificates that
the federal government awarded to veterans of the War of 1812.
The replacements were necessary because the New Madrid
Earthquake of 1811-1812 had rendered uninhabitable the land
originally designated in the certificates.
In the spring of 1821, when Benjamin Crowley,
who possessed a New Madrid Certificate, first arrived in the
area from his home in Kentucky to identify and claim land on
which to settle with his wife and eight children, he was 65
years old. He selected the site for his home because of the
existence there of a large spring, formerly used by Native
Americans for gatherings. The site is now part of Crowley’s
Ridge State Park, which is about 12 miles from present day
Paragould. Crowley’s family joined him on Christmas Day, 1821,
and moved into their new home.
Crowley became a prime factor in the
development of the area. The first post office was located in
this home, and the first church was organized there. Friends
and relatives from Kentucky related information from Crowley
that resulted in other Kentuckians’ relocating here.
In 1833, Greene County was formally organized
in the Crowley home. The original county included not only
present day Greene, but also what are now Clay County and a
section of Craighead County as well. Isaac Brookfield, a young
Methodist missionary from New Jersey and founder of that first
local church, became the new county’s first judge, and it was
he who is reputed to have suggested naming the county after
the famed Revolutionary War general, Nathaniel Greene.
Arkansas became a state in 1836, forty-six
years before the founding of Paragould. That momentous event
resulted from the expansion in the area of two major rail
lines. One was Jay Gould’s St. Louis and Iron Mountain
Railroad, now known as the Missouri Pacific, and the other was
J. W. Paramore’s Texas and St. Louis, now the Cotton Belt.
A new town was established at the juncture of
the two railroads. The name Paragould was coined from
the combination of the two rail magnates’ names, Para
from Paramore, and gould from, of course,
Gould. This city has the rare distinction of having a
name it shares with no other establishment in the world!
Paragould was incorporated March 3, 1883, and
the county seat was relocated here from Gainesville on October
6, 1884. Most of the town, including the eastern portion of
the McClure-Highfill property, was established on land that
was part of a 281-acre farm owned by Willis S. Pruett,
originally from Tennessee. Paragould’s main street is named
after this early settler.
The local economy originally centered around
lumber, abundant in great tracts of virgin timber, and the
industry was enhanced by the available rail transportation.
The local lumber businesses included small manufacturing
plants which produced wood products in Paragould and about
forty sawmills in the county. The influx of new residents who
flocked to what was, in fact, a boomtown, resulted in the town
council’s quickly organizing a town government.
By 1890 the population of Paragould had
reached 2528. By 1900 there existed a municipal water plant,
an electrical power plant, several private telephone
companies, three schools (one a business college and another a
Bible institute), and several modern department stores and
hotels. The downtown streets were lighted and paved.
In the early 1900’s, Claude V. Highfill, who
was born July 15, 1898, in Union City, Tennessee, came to
Greene County with his family. They settled near the Locust
Creek Ditch, and Claude attended grammar school through the
third grade at Big Island School. For a while he farmed, and
during the summers, from a horse and buggy, he sold Home
Comfort cook stoves, manufactured in St. Louis.
In about 1917, Claude Highfill married
Elizabeth Cox (born April 14, 1989) a one-fourth Native
American Indian orphan originally from Leachville, Arkansas.
After the deaths of her parents, Elizabeth had been in the
care of her grandparents. After they also died, she was raised
in Senath, Missouri, by two aunts, Birdie and Susie Cox.
Later Claude Highfill worked for the Stedman
Hardware Company before establishing a dray business with a
new truck he had been able to purchase. He hauled new and used
goods, mainly furniture, and had an office in Saul
Blankenship’s furniture store. His move from the transfer
business to the furniture business occurred quite
unintentionally.
The career-changing event involved a load of
furniture Highfill had contracted to transport to Tennessee.
When he arrived, the recipients could not pay all the charges,
so Highfill took some of the furniture in the shipment as
payment. Returning to Paragould with his goods, he rented
space on South Pruett Street next to the Home Bakery and went
into the used furniture business. Soon he moved across Pruett
Street and rented half the Joseph Store Building; O. M. Atkins
rented the other half. (Earl Vanhook worked for Atkins and
later headed what are now the Van Atkins Stores.)
In 1937 Claude Highfill, by now a success in
the furniture business, purchased the Eaker property at the
west end of Highland Street, formerly Depot Street, where it
intersects North Seventh Street at Happy-Go-Lucky Lane. The
Highfills did not buy the property for the house or even
primarily for its square block of land, but for the home
site. Situated seven blocks west of the Greene County
Courthouse, the location was no longer "in the country" as it
was when the Eakers built there, but was on the fashionable
outskirts of town. Highfill had the Eakers’ two-story house
dismantled, saving much of the lumber for use in the
construction of the large home he and Elizabeth built for
their family. Their children were Martin, Melvin, Betty, and
J. C.
The Highfills’ new home, an excellent example
of Craftsman style architecture, was under construction for
over a year. Alfred Thomas was the designer and builder, and
he and his crew, along with extra workers, including the
second of the Highfills’ sons, Melvin, worked laboriously with
NO power tools to construct the home. A mule-powered slip
(scoop) was used to excavate the full basement, and the
concrete for the foundation as well as the walls and floor of
the basement was hand mixed and transported in a wheelbarrow.
The workers’ pay was fifty cents a day! The total cost of
construction was $15,000.
Through the thirty-two years the Highfills
owned the property, they sold approximately nineteen acres of
the original homestead. Only about one half acre of land
remains with the house.
In the spring of 1969, Gary and Marilyn
McClure bought the Highfill home from Claude Highfill for
$17,369.59; Elizabeth Highfill had died December 26, 1958. The
McClures had three children--Leianne, Lucinda, and Mike--at
the time they purchased the property, and later a fourth
child, Tim, was born. Four months were devoted to renovating,
repairing, and refurbishing the home and converting the
basement from parking to living space before the family moved
in on August 17, 1969. In 1987, Marilyn McClure died. In 2003
Gary married Bonnie Ann Leadford. She and Gary are the current
owners of the McClure-Highfill Home.
