About The reminder. [volume] (Stamps, Arkansas) 1913-????
Stamps, Arkansas (1913-????)

The Reminder

In the 1860s, the Stamps family built a sawmill in the northeastern section of Lafayette County. The county is in the far southwestern corner of Arkansas bordering Louisiana. The Stamps's sawmill grew quickly after the Cotton Belt Railroad built lines through the county in 1882. A post office was established near the sawmill in 1888, named after Hardy James Stamps who ran the sawmill at the time. The Stamps's mill was later bought by the Bodcaw Lumber Company out of Texarkana in adjacent Miller County. By 1891, Bodcaw moved their headquarters to Stamps. The growing town was nicknamed the "saw-mill city," and incorporated in 1898. That same year, William Buchanan, owner of the Bodcaw Lumber Company, founded the Louisiana and Arkansas Railroad Company. He built the railroad shop headquarters in Stamps. The Stamps's sawmill grew into the largest yellow pine sawmill in the world. The lumber company stores in town offered all manner of goods, from clothing to coffins. The first newspaper in Stamps, the Lafayette County Democrat (1905-current), was founded in 1905.

By the 1910s, the mill had exhausted the local lumber resources, and as a result, the timber company and related businesses began to move away. The Bodcaw Company in Arkansas dissolved in 1917, and the remaining assets moved to the new Bodcaw Lumber Company of Louisiana. The Louisiana and Arkansas Railroad also moved its offices to Louisiana in 1923. Though the booming timber business had faded, Stamps maintained a population of a few thousand, with many turning to cotton and rice farming.

In 1907, Anthony Mitchell Salone, Sr. became the principal teacher at the Black Public School in Stamps, which held its classes in Owen Chapel Church. Salone's wife, Sara Annie Salone, was also a schoolteacher. Anthony Salone helped build a two-story school building and a four-room dormitory in 1910 for the students. This was the first school building in Stamps. Salone left the school in 1911 and founded the Stamps Times, a newspaper for the Black community. The Times ran until 1913, at which point Salone renamed his newspaper the Reminder, published on Saturdays. The Reminder seemingly ceased publication after 1913. Beginning in February 1915 and printing until 1922, the Arkansas School News was published by Salone for the Arkansas Negro Teachers' Association. It was a school journal for the Black public schools across Arkansas, published out of Stamps.

Salone's education and newspaper work were intertwined. During the summers, Salone taught seminars for teachers on keeping a modern curriculum alongside other Black teachers from around Arkansas. At one of the Arkansas Negro Teachers' Association meetings, he gave a talk about the school paper he published titled, "Rally for Arkansas School News." Salone and his family later moved to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where he resumed working as a schoolteacher.

As of this writing, there is only one surviving issue of the Reminder. This is the case for many Black newspapers, as past archival organizations were often neglectful of preserving the Black community's written heritage, and the newspapers did not survive. When newspapers disappear, Black voices are forever lost, leaving a large gap in the understanding of our history.

Provided by: Arkansas State Archives