Spout Spring: History of Fayetteville’s historic Black neighborhood and its next steps

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. (KNWA/KFTA) — NWA Black Heritage has taken the forefront in wanting to get Spout Spring recognized as a historic district.

While there’s opposition to the cause, the City of Fayetteville has entered a contract with Post Oak, a historic preservation consulting company, to provide a historical context statement about the buildings and area boundaries of Spout Spring — a neighborhood that is currently proposed as running from Lafayette Street down to 15th Street — that could be deemed either a local or national historic district.

“It will help us have a much better understanding of the history and the patterns and forces that shape the neighborhood that we know today,” Britin Bostick, Fayetteville’s long-range planning coordinator, said.

As for the history, patterns and forces Bostick is mentioning, Spout Spring has its roots in slavery, according to NWA Black Heritage co-founder and president Sharon Killian.

“Senator David Walker — he didn’t come as senator but as an attorney — he bought land here,” Killian said. “He also brought with him a boy, a Black boy, and as an enslaved person. And then, he just built that up. He ended up with one of the largest numbers of people here.”

The Black population in Fayetteville was around 30% by 1865, Killian said.

Those numbers can be attributed to Blacks being brought to Fayetteville through slavery, but also due to the city being a more inviting stopping point than other sundown towns in Washington County.

“They really couldn’t run anywhere else, except for going through here and going maybe further north,” Killian said. “Fayetteville was a place to stop.”

That didn’t mean racism and erasure weren’t still prevalent, though. Killian said the Fayetteville Square used to be a place where the purchase and selling of slaves could take place.

As time marched on, Killian said Blacks were forced into “a 10-acre pen” of Spout Spring by white landowners. She said whites would purchase more affluent land with more appeal — such as a better view on the hill or running water — which pushed Blacks further south in Fayetteville.

The places and faces of the neighborhood bred life into it.

Killian said a list of people who were pertinent to Spout Spring wouldn’t do justice because it took each banding together as a collective to survive and thrive in the neighborhood. As for places that were cornerstones of Spout Spring, look nowhere else than St. James United Methodist Church on Willow Avenue.

The church is still operational today after being founded in 1861. Killian said religion was an outlet for Blacks in Spout Spring not only to build community but also as an educational tool with lackluster educational opportunities at the time.

“There are people inside the church who may have some kind of gift, a musical gift, oratorial skills,” Killian said.

Other neighborhood staples, though, like the Henderson School, no longer remain. Some buildings were razed intentionally, while others simply couldn’t withstand the test of time. Rachel Whitaker, a historian with the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History, said the removal of historic buildings is a complex topic.

“The erasure of any history is tragic, especially if it happens before we have a chance to fully document and research,” Whitaker said. “Do you say that somebody can’t come in and purchase land and do with it what they want to?”

Bostick said there are differences between a local and national historic district.

A national registry is recognized by the National Park Service as a particular “collection of buildings shares a time and a theme,” which features a specifically drawn boundary and the buildings can be deemed either contributing or non-contributing to the focused time period.

A local ordinance district comes with regulations, such as an approval process to make changes to the exterior of a building.

If buildings are nationally recognized, they could be open to federal historic tax credits.

“The advantage is when you want to take a building that’s not in very good shape and invest a lot of money into making it come back to life again,” Bostick said. “Let’s say you need a new roof, let’s say you need to have the windows substantially repaired and it’s going to be very costly to do those windows.”

Killian said Spout Spring is beginning to “liven up” again.

“We are going to continue to grow with an effort to center the Black heritage that is here.”

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