Van Winkle's Mill Archaeological Project

The Death of Peter Van Winkle. In the winter of 1882, while walking on a street in downtown Rogers, Arkansas, in the company of his wife, Temperance, Peter fell dead of a stroke.

One of Peter's sons summoned a special funeral engine and coach overnight from St. Louis (over 300 miles away), and Peter's body was borne in style a distance of approximately eleven miles south to the railroad depot he helped establish in Fayetteville..

"Gathered at the Frisco Depot on Dickson St. in Fayetteville, Arkansas on the morning of February 11, 1882, were the city's leading businessmen, officials, Freemasons and a large crowd of townspeople. They were there to perform a sad duty. The day before, on Friday, February 10th an old and honored citizen of Fayetteville- Peter Van Winkle- had died in the neighboring town of Rogers. Now, on the morning of the 11th, a special train dispatched overnight from St. Louis to Rogers was bringing Van Winkle's body and his family home. The funeral train pulled in at 9:30 A.M., Van Winkle's coffin was placed in a waiting horsedrawn hearse, his family entered waiting carriages and a procession formed behind. It moved east up Dickson Street, turned south onto College Ave. for three blocks, then west onto Center Street, stopping a half-block down Center in front of a three-story frame edifice known far and wide as Van Winkle's House, Van Winkle's Hall or Van Winkle's Hotel. The building was draped in the trappings of mournful black. Van Winkle lay in state there until 2 p.m. Sunday when, with Masonic honors, he was conveyed a few blocks west on Center Street to Evergreen Cemetery and buried" (Rothrock 1973:61-62).

Peter Van Winkle A six-hundred dollar monument was ordered from Long and Wheete of Carthage, Missouri. It too displays the trappings of a successful member of the community: a three-tiered base upon which a obelisk-like plinth was placed. Atop that plinth sat a marble urn.

The Masonic badge is prominently displayed on the plinth. In this cemetery, founded by the local Masonic Lodge, he was laid to rest near other prominent Fayetteville residents. The large obelisk-style grave marker, complete with Masonic insignia, indicated that his grave belonged to a well-regarded individual of his place and time. His obituaries proclaimed him the "Lumber King of Northwest Arkansas" (Easley and McAnelly 1996:156-7) and later newspaper articles would frequently refer to him as "the greatest genius and captain of industry that the hills of northwest Arkansas ever nurtured" (Elliot 1959; Funk 1962:7).

The inscription on the back side of Peter's stone is now almost illegible, but luckily a hand-scrawled note on the back of the monument invoice sits in the probate box at the Bentonville Courthouse. The note's author is Temperance Van Winkle, and aside from attempting to insure the proper spelling of "Van Winkle," it gives us the text to the poem once inscribed on that now weathered monument:

What to us is life without thee---Darkness and despair alone.

When with sighs we seek to find thee

This tomb proclaims that thou art gone.

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The Beginning of Van Winkle's Mill

The Postbellum "Golden Age"

The Death of Peter Van Winkle

Van Winkle's Mill into the Twentieth Century

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