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calsfoundation@cals.org
A Beautiful Day
The day after the March 31, 2023, tornado was as beautiful a day as has ever graced central Arkansas.
My friend, artist V. L. Cox, was in town, having been honored the same day the twisters came roaring through with an alumni award from her alma mater, Henderson State University. She had been terrified of tornadoes since living through the 1997 outbreak that struck Arkadelphia, and while Arkadelphia wasn’t affected again this time around, the twister that cut through central Arkansas ran just south of the St. Joseph Center, where she was staying.
When I went to take her some dinner on April 1, 2023, that part of North Little Rock was still without power, and from the hill on which St. Joseph’s sits, we could see blue tarps already covering many of the houses in the Amboy neighborhood just south of us.
But it was a beautiful day, as those days that come after major storms often are, with the sky exhibiting that shade of blue for which people coined the terms “azure” or “cerulean”—because you need some word deeper than just “blue” or even “sky blue” to connote the depth of that color.
After V. L. finished the chicken and dumplings I had brought, she took me through the unlighted orphanage building and up to the attic in which two massive cisterns were still present and then up onto the roof and across a narrow walkway over to the cupola that topped the building.
From there, we could see across Little Rock and beyond. The Simmons First National Bank Tower was the most obvious landmark, but the Broadway Bridge, Robinson Auditorium, and the old Acxiom building could be seen too. Looking to the southeast, I could even see the White Bluff Generating Plant near Redfield, a whole county over. And it occurred to me that those people who built and lived at St. Joseph’s in the first years of its operation would not have had any of these landmarks. Nothing in Little Rock would have stood tall enough to be gauged so easily with the naked eye. Maybe some of the buildings down by the riverfront would have been discernable. However, it would have been hard to know that you could see all the way into Jefferson County because nothing would have stood so clear there as the power plant does now.
As you probably know by now, part of the historic St. Joseph structure was destroyed by fire on March 19, 2025. St. Joseph Center, the organization that rents the site from the Diocese of Little Rock for use as an agricultural, educational, and arts center, has started a fundraiser for rebuilding the damaged portions of the structure and helping employees and the people who lived on site who are now homeless. I donated myself because I find the mission of the St. Joseph Center comparable to that of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas. After all, both aim to cultivate an appreciation for everything local, though St. Joe’s takes a much more hands-on approach. Besides, I’ve had many good times there, from lending a little muscle to one of V. L.’s art projects (carting the church pieces described here in a garage on site) to attending the odd night market with my wife—drinking beer, eating fish, and petting the goats. Even a southern atheist would say without irony the phrase “They’re doing the Lord’s work” to describe folks dedicating themselves to making the lives of others better.
That day in 2023 was too beautiful a day to miss the opportunity of seeing the world on a bigger scale, the ground spread out below, the sky stretched out above. Buildings have gone up since that orphanage was built, and other buildings have, of necessity, come down. And sometimes the random fluctuations of climate and weather show us just how small and fragile our own history is, as with the tornado that had cut through central Arkansas just the day before, tearing up landmarks such as Burns Park. And as with the fire that, whatever its source, torched the roof and chapel of St. Joe’s.
Dr. Norman Lavers, a former professor of mine at Arkansas State University, once wrote a story in which a woman who served as the editor of a small literary magazine was confronted by a rather Mephistophelean man who offered her first the choice to save someone’s life by erasing from history a specific work of literature, and then later to save from historical loss older works that had been destroyed by sacrificing some people in the present day. The main character, after making this decision and that, starts to choke on the impossibility of weighing a life against literature and, in the end, all her decisions are undone, and in the distance she can hear the sirens of an ambulance racing toward the body of the friend whom she was first offered the chance to save.
There is really no divide at all between abstractions such as art and history on the one hand and the concrete lives of human beings on the other. Sometimes, maybe, preservationists can get caught up in the details or style of a particular structure and lament the changes people have made over the years. But you couldn’t erase from history a building like St. Joseph’s without impacting the lives of so many people, from the children who lived there when it was a Catholic orphanage to the soldiers flooding into the boomtown of Belmont during World War I. The history of any building is not just writ in the details of its construction and alteration but in the lives of those who inhabit the site—and even those who don’t but, instead, leave things to decay in a field or city block somewhere. Ultimately, those of us who work to preserve history aren’t working for the sake of history itself, but for the sake of others living in the present, as well as those to come.
Or as I learned, looking over the world from atop St. Joseph’s, we can really only gauge our place in this world in the context of the works of our fellow human beings.
By Guy Lancaster, editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas
