Zacahry Taylor, The Sisters of Mercy & The Archeology of 19th Century Fort Smith, Arkansas.......

Cultural Memory and Fort Smith

One of the intriguing aspects of this project came not from the archeology, but from the realm of cultural memory. Everyone we had talked to had mentioned this chimney in connection with Zachary Taylor, but NONE--not even the Deacon and other members of the Immaculate Conception congregation--had mentioned that that this same building had been the first convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Fort Smith (Church of the Immaculate Conception 1999:18-19).

When we came across this fact during our archival research, we were astonished. The story of native Irish nuns and at least eight Irish families transplanted directly from their native land to what was then the very edge of the western world--the frontier border with Indian Territory--seemed like a story worth telling to us. Not to mention that, unlike Zachary Taylor, The Sisters of Mercy had a long-term and lasting impact on Fort Smith; founding St. Anne's Academy, St. Edward's Hospital, and educating many generations of Fort Smith's Catholic youth.

Why didn't Fort Smith want to remember the Sisters of Mercy?

Because of its entanglements with other operational constructs, the definition of cultural memory is remarkably hard to parse. It is "not the retrieval of stored information, but the putting together of a claim about past states of affairs by means of a framework of shared cultural understanding" (Radley 1990:46).Cultural memory can be seen as a piecemeal integration of various different personal pasts into a single common past(s) that members of a larger community come to identify with and remember collectively (Misztal 2003:11). It is a "collective project that is crucial to the consolidation or construction of group, community or national identities," but it's also (and we often do not talk about this aspect as much) "a site of hegemonic struggle, as a fluid ideological terrain" (Swedenburg 2003:xxix).

In the case of Fort Smith, Zachary Taylor and the Sisters of Mercy there are several factors which work in multiple ways to favor General Taylor over the Sisters in the town's cultural memory. First there is the historical trope of the frontier--to most in the region the idea of historical Fort Smith conjures up pictures of bands of outlaws, the menace of attacks from the Indian territory, "hanging" Judge Parker and his infamous gallows, and, of course, Belle Starr and her other "ladies of the evening" housed in Fort Smith's notorious brothels. This rough, rowdy, lawless idea of the frontier leaves little room for the formal education and piety represented by the Sisters of Mercy.

Zachary Taylor, on the other hand, was nicknamed "Old Rough and Ready," and spent much of his career policing the frontier and battling with Native American groups. The Sisters, of course, fit in to aspects of this trope better than one might think as they has a reputation for ministering to prostitutes in the urban slums of Ireland, but that is lost under the weight of popular ideas about the city's frontier past.

Anti-Catholic sentiment is another very likely factor in the suppression of the Sisters of Mercy in Fort Smith's cultural memory. In the 1840s, anti-Catholic factions in the Fort Smith area filed a lawsuit in an attempt to keep Bishop Byrne from purchasing old Camp Belknap for his Irish colony, and anti-"papist" rhetoric played an major part in discourses of many southern and rural political movements in the late nineteenth century (as well as the first half of the twentieth century). I can't help but suspect that this may be the explanation for large silences in several published Fort Smith histories--such as omission of St. Anne's Academy from the chapter on schools and education in one such history published in the 1960s (Maples 1965:56-61) despite the fact that St. Anne's was the second school to be chartered in the whole state of Arkansas and didn't close its doors until 1973 (Sisters of Mercy 1989:191).

Despite all of these factors that work to mitigate the Sisters of Mercy's presence in Fort Smith's history, this lone chimney and the artifacts recovered from our excavations, have provided us with a glimpse through the haze of cultural memory to their definite and important presence and works.

On to Refernces Cited

Back to Artifacts