Skeleton in the Walls: Mysterious Arkansas Farmhouse Hides Civil War History

A peculiar southeast Arkansas farmhouse conceals an obscure treasure of agriculture, grit, and ingenuity behind its walls—a 19th century steamboat.

By Chris Bennett

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September 29, 2021 12:12 PM

A secret hides behind the swollen walls of a peculiar farmhouse in southeast Arkansas, and a climb into the attic is a trip through time to a trapped moment just after the Civil War. Rows of slanted cedar poles jut from the floor, square nails protrude from odd bits of attached, hand-hewn wood, and the outer roof overhangs the remnants of a secondary, smaller roof line—essentially two teepees occupying the same space. Despite its nonsensical appearance, the attic is the key that turns the lock on the mystery of the entire structure.

A stone’s throw from the banks of the Mississippi River and the Helena Bridge, in Phillips County, Ark., Mikey Taylor, Jr., grows endless rows of corn, cotton, grain sorghum, peanuts, and soybeans in the fields of Long Lake Plantation. Just off the center of his operation, flanked by several headquarter buildings and the steady traffic of machinery on gravel, the farmhouse with the odd attic sits in relative quiet, sheltering an obscure treasure of agriculture, settlement, grit, and ingenuity. Taylor, Jr., and his family lived in the house for several years: “Not many people know what’s really inside,” he says, “but you can see it if you know what to look for.”

The house, with a telltale outer front wall that slants widest at the base of the structure, conceals a mid-19^th century steamboat within, resting in the precise spot from where it was pulled roughly 40 yards from the waters of Long Lake and dry-docked in the late 1860s. Plainly stated, the building is a boat.

Farms are often the keepers of American tales, and the odd Long Lake home, with a boat behind its walls, is an absolute repository of the past. A house within a house is a nesting egg of history, but an understanding of its significance requires a trip backward through time, escorted by the Taylor patriarch, Mike Taylor, Sr., to the death throes of the Civil War.

“The Yankees Took It All”

“Not too long ago, just 150 years or so, this whole area was wild—plenty of sloughs, woods and thickets,” says Taylor. “The people were wild too, split between finer society, industry, logging, whorehouses, and juke joints, just what you’d expect from a classic river community. It had great farming opportunity, but it was definitely a place where a good sheriff was valued.”

Indeed. A “good sheriff” might be the best anchor point to explain the bulbous walls and distinctive attic of the Long Lake farmhouse. Rewind to the beginning.

Roughly 45 miles south of Nashville, close to the bull’s-eye of Tennessee, the city of Columbia was once a bustling hive of commerce during the antebellum era, just prior to the Civil War, and even today, the city is considered the epicenter of remaining antebellum homes in the Volunteer State. Columbia was the domain of the Pillow family, major shakers and movers of Southern society, with a standalone history tightly woven in the threads of America’s political, military, and agricultural past.

In the 1840s, Jerome Bonaparte Pillow (1809-1891), a planter and head of one of the family branches, traveled to southeast Arkansas to drop cash on a prescient investment—Delta farmland in Phillips County. He bought thousands of acres of promising agricultural ground, and then returned home to Tennessee, with no apparent intention to relocate or settle beyond his home state.

Roughly 20 years later, in May 1862, 16-year-old Edward (E.D.) Pillow (1846-1913), Jerome Bonaparte Pillow’s scion and eldest of two sons born to Elvira Pillow, secretly enlisted in the Confederate Army, possibly in response to the seismic uproar triggered by the two-day Battle of Shiloh fought a month earlier, roughly 100 miles to the southwest—the bloodiest fight to that point in American history, with 23,000 soldiers dead or wounded. Even prior to Shiloh, E.D. likely was drawn to the prospect of enlistment by the military careers of several relatives, including his uncle, Brigadier General Gideon Pillow, who fought in both the Mexican-American War and Civil War.

Signing with the 6^th Tennessee Cavalry, Pillow saw action in a steady chain of blue-gray conflicts, serving until 1865. At 19 years of age, following the Confederate surrender, he turned his horse toward Columbia, and arrived to find an economy in ruins, and a family dynamic turned on its head. “His whole world had changed,” describes Taylor. “E.D. rides in on his Confederate cavalry horse to find everything he knew in shambles. His daddy (Jerome Bonaparte Pillow) basically says, ‘Don’t even get out of the saddle. There’s nothing here for you; the Yankees took it all.’”

Significantly, beyond the presence of a younger brother, Jerome Bonaparte Pillow, Jr. (1848-1913), E.D. also had five older sisters contending for family consideration. “E.D.’s daddy was looking at cold, hard reality,” Taylor continues. “He told E.D. what must have been the painful bottom line: ‘I’ve got your sisters to help take care of and the future for you is elsewhere. Go to Arkansas and farm the land I bought. Get your younger brother and go make a life.’”

Blue Poplar

Today’s traveler moving from Columbia, Tenn., to Helena, Ark., has myriad highway options, but the basic route is a 275-mile, 4.5-hour drive, dropping southwest to Corinth, Miss., sliding under Memphis across the northwest tip of Mississippi, and rolling through Tunica before crossing the big water into Helena and Phillips County. However, in the pre-mechanized 1860s, water world held sway.

E.D. and Jerome, Jr. (19 and 17) solved the logistical travel puzzle by gathering equipment and supplies, securing the load on a river-worthy vessel, and eventually easing down the Mississippi River in 1866, toward the land purchased 20 years in the past by their father. Long Lake, a 5-mile body of water with an inlet and outlet to the Mississippi River, ran through the acreage. Differing from most lakes within immediate proximity of the river, Long Lake was not a classic oxbow, but was formed by upheaval during the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812, and it was a pristine body of water in 1866, in contrast to the chokepoint of today.

“Even during my lifetime, it was still special and clean,” Taylor recalls. “Fishing, boating and playing were once part of Long Lake summer, but in approximately 1960, Helena destroyed the natural balance by diverting the city’s storm sewage drain into the lake, and it became a receptacle for every bit of trash from furniture to tires to tennis shoes. But in the 1860s, E.D. could move right off the river, channel into Long Lake, and pull up to our land right on the bank.”

The 1860s was within the heyday of steam power, and Taylor’s presumption centers on the Pillow brothers traveling by steamboat. Prior to steamboat technology, river traffic was dominated by keelboats, flat-bottomed vessels dependent on current. Keelboats could only travel upriver via poling—a laborious, time-heavy task—and the vessels were often scrapped for timber at journey’s end, or sold for a further trip downriver, depending on location. Once at the mouth of the Mississippi River, travelers were forced to return overland by foot or horseback to points of origin via routes such as the Natchez Trace.

However, by the 1860s (fueled by coal; sometimes by wood), steamboats churned up and down all navigable rivers, typically operating via a sidewheel, sternwheel, or more rarely, a propellor. The Pillow brothers’ steamboat was likely of simple construction: hull, boiler, pilot box, and cabin.

Taylor believes the Pillows initially went back and forth to Columbia with the farming seasons. “I don’t know how many times they made the trip, but they would have been transporting as much farm machinery and supplies as possible. At some point, they decided to haul the boat out of the water and turn it into a house. Just the effort, and I’m guessing they used logs and mules, to drag it to higher ground was incredible. They got it out of the water, kept it upright, and modified it accordingly.”

Was it common for farmers or settlers traveling down a river to use a boat in construction at the point of destination? “I know there is another building in Helena made from a boat,” Taylor says. “But I’d guess most of the time the boat was disassembled and the timber reused. Then again, maybe there are a lot more old houses made from boats and we just don’t realize the history.”

The Long Lake farmhouse, with its wide-bottom walls, is roughly 80’-by-40’, hinting at the approximate size of the boat by its present remains within—30’-by-15’. “The house originally had two rooms. It was nothing but a small house with a larger house added on,” Taylor explains. “The bottom of the outer wall kicks out further than the top. On the inside, it’s completely normal after all these years—except in the attic, where you can see the boat’s round cypress poles and square nails. You stand under the pitched outer roof, and off to your right is the smaller line of the original roof.”

The Pillow’s boat was built mainly of cypress wood, but during renovation work in the 1970s, while repairing a door, Taylor made a revealing discovery—hand-hewn blue poplar. “I’d guess they used cypress for all the main body, but blue poplar was also used in the boat, at least in places that didn’t contact water.”

One-Armed Sheriff

E.D. and Jerome, Jr. split the acres bought by their father, quickly established their agriculture operations, married and started families, and built stately homes within Helena. (Jerome’s Victorian masterpiece, the Pillow-Thompson House, still stands, designed by renowned architect George Barber and erected in 1896.)

Over time, the farmhouse transitioned to a refuge from the mid-day sun, Taylor explains. “They’d tie their horses in the shade, take a break from whatever was happening on the farm, and take a nap on the porch. It became a day-house on the farm.”

Long Lake Plantation became the hub for dozens of tenant houses, gin, sawmill, general store, storage buildings, equipment sheds, and mule barn, all the components required of a large Delta operation, under the eye of E.D., who had set permanent roots in Phillips County. From an unsourced newspaper column, circa 1900, regarding E.D.: “In 1866 he came to Helena and engaged in farming, which pursuit he has since continued. He is the owner of about 3,000 acres of land, has about 1,600 acres under cultivation, and is deeply interested in the raising of cotton. In 1884 he was elected sheriff, re-elected in 1886 and 1888, and is now serving his third term.”

“Sheriff.” As the chief law enforcement officer in a river town, Pillow dealt with all manner of crime and illegality. Presumably, his time in combat and military service shaped him for the role, according to Taylor. “He had to be as tough as they came to deal with all the characters that would have been running around the Helena area during those days,” Taylor notes. “E.D. also was one-armed from a gin accident, so it gives you an idea just what he was capable of handling. I still have his vest-pocket pistol (.32 caliber; a 5-shot Smith and Wesson revolver).”

At 67, E.D. Pillow died in 1913, and was buried in Maple Hill Cemetery, on the northern outskirts of Helena. Long Lake Plantation’s ample cotton rows, buttressed by fields of corn and oats to sustain scores of mules, passed into a descending branch of the family tree, and fell into the hands of E.D.’s daughter—Camille Pillow Gordon.

Enter Mike Taylor.

Lock, Stock, and Barrel

In the 1920s, Earl Wells, Sr. left behind the heavy timber of Drew County in the southeastern corner of Arkansas, bound 120 miles north for the commerce of Helena. Wells established a mule barn in Helena and farmed on the side. In his role as mule barn proprietor, Wells rubbed elbows with landowners across the county, and was consistently approached regarding farmland rental potential. The abundance of farmland lease options spurred Wells toward an aversion to ownership and an avowed “widow-a-week” policy.

“Almost every week, Mr. Wells had a widow from somewhere asking him about renting her farmland. He said the ‘widow-a-week’ kept him from even considering to buy farmland,” Taylor recounts.

In 1938, Wells recognized the potential of Long Lake Plantation’s ground and set-up, and approached E.D. Pillow’s daughter, Camille Pillow Gordon, about leasing her ground. In the rental norms of the era, most farmland was contracted on gin-whistle terms. Translated: when the final gin whistle blew at the absolute tail-end of the year, farmers counted dollars and pennies, and paid according to what was left after settling everything else. Fairly summarized, it was often an opaque process that left many debts dangling.

Yet, Wells made Gordon an offer she couldn’t refuse. Wells offered monthly rent, paid in 12 installments—lock, stock, and barrel. “He said he’d pay steady, and she could budget accordingly,” Taylor says. “That was unheard of. In fact, everyone around said he was nuts and crazy for doing it. He didn’t listen to a word of the criticism and instead rented Long Lake Plantation by the month.”

Rented from Pillow descendants by the Wells-Taylor family for the next 66 years, Mike Taylor, son-in-law of Earl Wells, Jr., then closed the chapter, buying the ground from E.D. Pillow’s granddaughter in 2004. As shown by time, Wells’ “nuts and crazy” venture proved a wise business choice.

“Just One Day”

The house, with its forgotten boat, is emblematic of the incredibly rich history contained on innumerable farms across the United States. The history is often concealed even from landowners, waiting patiently just below the dirt or behind a wall, but the dynamic presents a clear maxim: farmland preserves.

Over 150 years after a journey down the Mississippi River, construction of a peculiar farmhouse, and establishment of a successful agriculture operation—all done prior to the age of mechanization—E.D. Pillow’s memory strikes one request from Taylor. “I’d love to go back in time and see how all this was done. Just one day: Let me walk a day in your shoes.”