John T. Chidester of Camden was an early transportation leader in Arkansas. While his coaches and mail wagons transported passengers and the U.S. mails throughout much of mid-1800s America, Chidester is probably best known in Arkansas history for the major role his company played in the famed Butterfield Overland Mail service from Memphis to Fort Smith.
John Thomas Chidester was born in Cooperstown, N.Y., on Dec. 6, 1816, to a family long known for its stagecoach and freight businesses. The family later moved to Georgia, where young John became a contract mail hauler. In 1854 he moved to Mississippi where he also began multiple transportation lines, later headquartering in Tuscumbia, Ala. Chidester-owned stagecoaches and wagons carried mail and passengers across the southeast.
It was probably the arrival of railroads which caused Chidester to relocate his business from Tuscumbia to Camden, Arkansas in 1857. Having married a Mississippi woman in 1854, Chidester reputedly paid $10,000 to buy the magnificent Peter McCollum home in Camden for his growing family.
Not long after Chidester arrived in Arkansas, Congress created an overland mail route from the eastern states to the West Coast. The new law authorized the Postmaster General to sign a contract providing for "the entire letter mail" to be transported from "such point on the Mississippi River as the contractors might select to San Francisco." St. Louis was chosen as the departure point, but in the end, the Postmaster General, former Tennessee Governor Aaron V. Brown, dictated that a separate route must embark from Memphis.
In the meantime, John Warren Butterfield, the scion of another old American transportation family, received the contract to develop the overland route. At the huge sum of $600,000 per annum, the Butterfield company was charged with delivering the mail twice weekly across 2,795 miles of countryside.
Butterfield, who knew little of the geography of Arkansas, assumed the stages departing St. Louis could travel due south through the Arkansas delta and connect with the Memphis stage, then proceed across mid-Arkansas to Fort Smith.
However, Butterfield soon learned that poor roads and vast swamps made it necessary for the St. Louis coaches to use a route through Springfield, Mo., and then travel through Northwest Arkansas to Fort Smith.
Again showing his unfamiliarity with the brutal realities of travel in frontier Arkansas, Butterfield assumed he could transport the mail from Memphis to Fort Smith via steamboat. However, low water levels made that approach impossible much of the time. Butterfield then contracted with Chidester's company to handle the Memphis-to-Fort Smith segment.
Chidester quickly set up a twice-weekly route, but he faced many obstacles. The slightest rains could turn delta roads into muddy quagmires. And river transport was not reliable either.
Always innovative, Chidester drew upon a variety of options to get the mail across Arkansas. In addition to his fine Concord stagecoaches--which had a capacity of 4,000 pounds, including nine passengers--Chidester relied upon existing railroads and steamboats to complete his appointed rounds.
Arkansas had a tiny little railroad line in 1858 when the overland mail began service. The Memphis and Little Rock Railroad was completed on both ends, but a long gap in the middle meant that travelers had to take both stages and steamboats to get from Madison near modern Forrest City to Des Arc.
The late historian Ted Worley has written: ". . . there was no such thing as a single Butterfield Overland Mail Route from Memphis to Fort Smith." He concluded, "There must have been a dozen ways, if small variations are counted, by which mail and passengers traveled the Overland Route through central Arkansas."
As originally planned, the overland route ran due west from Memphis--which meant it passed about 25 miles north of the capital city. Mail from Little Rock was transported by buggy to the overland stop at Atlanta (modern Austin, Ark).
If rivers were sufficiently high to enable steamboat navigation, Butterfield-owned vessels were pressed into service. The Jenny Whipple plied the Arkansas between Little Rock and Fort Smith, while the Charm operated between Des Arc and Clarendon. The steamboats offered the advantages of a smooth ride, hot meals, and comfortable beds.
Chidester established a number of way-stations and stops along the route to Fort Smith. From Des Arc the coaches journeyed along the north side of the Arkansas River through Cadron, Lewisburg (present-day Morrilton), Pottsville, and Norristown (modern Russellville), where the stage was ferried across the Arkansas River in order to complete the run to Fort Smith with stops at Dardanelle and Charleston among other places.
While Chidester must be given huge credit for his efforts to bring scheduled transportation services to Arkansas, his reputation is not pristine. During the early days of the Civil War, Chidester, a southern sympathizer, allowed Confederates to spy on the U.S. mail. After the war, Chidester was pardoned for his disloyalty and he received numerous contracts to haul the mail in western states. During this time he was caught up in the Star Route Scandals, which involved paying bribes to postal authorities for lucrative contracts.
Chidester died in 1892 at his home in Camden. The Chidester House, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, is now a museum operated by the Ouachita County Historical Society.
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Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living in rural Hot Spring County. Email him at Arktopia.td@gmail.com.
Editorial on 12/20/2015