With strong wind whipping up Block Street in Fayetteville, Mayor Lionel Jordan addressed a small crowd gathered outside the Experience Fayetteville Visitor Center on the city's downtown square last Thursday. They're there to see the unveiling of a new historical marker.
The plaque marks the spot where in 1839 a Cherokee man named Nelson Orr was stabbed to death by a white grocery store owner, Willis Wallace, an event that nearly led to the burning of Fayetteville.
Sean Teuton is the head of the Indigenous Studies Department at the University of Arkansas and helped to get the marker placed here.
"And I discovered quickly that Fayetteville is a very native place," Teuton said. "If you just dig barely beneath the surface, we find so much here, and that led me to the sad, the inspiring story of Nelson Orr."
Teuton says Orr was part of the Benge detachment of Cherokee who made their way through the region during their forced removal along the Trail of Tears.
"In January of 1839, he, among other 1900 Cherokees, camped just down the hill here at the present-day Women's Soccer Stadium," Teuton said. "And they were in need of supplies, ragged, exhausted. They were almost to Fort Gibson. I mean, that's where they would land, very close. But they needed food and clothing. People were starving, hungry, cold. You can imagine January here in that time."
"And they came up to the present-day square, to about where the Campbell Bell Building is, and there was a general store there...And imagine like 1900 Cherokees descending here, how nervous that might have made a very few white settlers that were here at the time," Teuton said. "And they came up to the square, and they sought to get supplies when someone, they say, hurled an insult at a Cherokee woman, and then a young man wanted to defend her honor, and his name was Nelson Orr."
He said for years, Orr was barely mentioned in the city's history, or worse, mischaracterized.
"Well, the local history books have said for years that Nelson Ore was a desperado," he said. "And it was very clear to me early on that the historian got it wrong. This man, Albert Arrington, because he said that they were here in the summer, and the detachment was here in the winter. How could you get that so wrong? So everything else was put into question for me, and I began to talk to other Cherokee historians that I've known over the years, and they were pretty angry about this, and they said Nelson Ore was a translator. He was, because he was a translator, he was probably a leader."
Sean Treat, a communications professor at the University of North Texas and a Fayetteville native, helped with the research for this project, and said he began looking into the history of Orr during the pandemic when he stumbled across an interesting fact.
"I went to the Cherokee archives and found out that he was married to Lucy Bench, who's the daughter of the big chief Lowry," Treat said. "And so I was like, oh my god, this guy was royalty. I mean, he was married to Cherokee royalty."
And it's that connection, he said, that could explain the uproar that was stoked by the attack. According to the Goodspeed account of Arkansas Histories, hundreds of Cherokee from the nearby camp rode into town, guns drawn and ready to burn the settlement to the ground. However, several Cherokee leaders and translators convinced them to stop, and Orr finally died from his wounds after several days.
With this new information, Treat, along with Teuton and local historian J.B. Hogan, worked to re-examine Orr's legacy and place in Fayetteville history.
"Well, that's the thing, knowing the history, it's significant," Treat said. "It's meaningful to me because I think Dr. Teuton said it best, this guy should be remembered as a hero, not a villain, you know? And I feel like that that's one of the tricks about history, is that an ignorance of your history doesn't protect you from your obligations and debts from it."
Orr's marker sits just a few yards away from a plaque dedicated to another historical Nelson, Nelson Hackett, an enslaved man who fled to freedom in Canada but was brought back to Fayetteville and publicly whipped on the city square in 1842. And Willis Wallace, the man who murdered Orr, had also owned Hackett at one point, according to the Goodspeed records.
Britin Bostick is the city's long-range planning and special projects manager and said while the markers may seem small, bringing these stories to light is vital.
"Both of these men have been very thoroughly researched. Their stories are closing on 200 years old at this point," she said.
"Our community is so much better off and so much richer for knowing these things, and I think that's reflected in the number of people who not only choose to partner with us to do that work, but also who show up to events like this to say, I want to be present for this happening."
And though it might appear morbid or a bit out of place to have these violent incidents marked in a square that's now more frequent to seasonal festivals and Saturday morning farmers markets, Bostick says it's a reminder of the hidden history that is all around us.
"You come across something like this, it's a little wild," she said. "You have a marker that's telling a story of a murder on the Fayetteville square while you're at the farmers market. But that's sometimes some of the best places to tell those stories because there are places where people may be surprised and that may help pique their curiosity."
Though he was charged with Nelson Orr's death, Willis Wallace was eventually acquitted, according to historical records. And Teuton, who is Cherokee, said part of what makes this day so special is that in some way, Orr is finally getting justice.
"And I hope I made this clear in my statement that we see justice today," Teuton said. "We see a kind of restitution for Cherokees and for the descendants of settlers and those who make Fayetteville their home and the region their home. This is a really proud moment for everyone."
