Dusty Relics of Arkansas History
June 5-11, 2017
Old Mike
By Bob Denman
Prescott Arkansas is my Dads hometown, it’s a quiet town just north of Hope and this is an odd yet very true story. Prescott grew up around a water and fuel station on the old Missouri Pacific train line. As a youngster we would travel to Curly Wolves territory to visit my granddad. It was in his Prescott home that I first heard about “Old Mike”.
The locals didn’t really know his full name, he was just Mike, a traveling salesman who visited the town once a month to sell pens, paper, and threads to homes near the train station in the center of town. He would arrive by train in the afternoon, sell his products to local residents, and board a departing train the next afternoon.
One morning in 1911, his body was found underneath a tree in the city park where he apparently died of a heart attack or stroke. A search of his belongings didn’t turn up any identification . . .all anyone knew was he was just Mike, maybe 40 or 45 years old, spoke English with an Italian accent, 5 feet 4 inches tall, brown eyes, brown hair, partly bald, a tattoo on his right arm, two gold teeth, and had suffered some type of injury to his right side. . . .maybe the effects of an earlier stroke.
The local paper reported that his remains were embalmed by undertaker John Cornish and would be held for a few days with hopes something might be learned about his relatives. A few years passed but no relative came forward to claim Mike.
Cornish Funeral home put him on public display in a glass case hoping someone would eventually come forward to identify and claim the body. More years passed, but nobody claimed Mike. He remained on display becoming a local tourist attraction. On Saturday nights teenage boys brought their dates by to peek at Mike through the front window. Wide eyed school children came to see Mike as did folks from surrounding counties, even as far away as Little Rock, including me and my brother Stan.
The mortuary staff treated Mike with a measure of respect, cleaning and redressing the body annually. He was even photographed in his pen stripe suit leaning up against the funeral homes brand new Studebaker hearse back in the 20’s.
In 1975, the Arkansas Attorney General’s office asked Cornish Funeral Home to bury the body. After 64 years of public display, Mike’s remains were finally interred during a quiet ceremony.
The April 1864 battle of Prairie DeAnn, where the Federal Army’s Camden Expedition met Confederate forces during the American Civil War, occurred just outside of Prescott. It’s a cemetery today and is where many of my Denman relatives rest.
Old Mike is there too ... marked by a gravestone provided by the funeral home. It reads simply ... Old Mike, died August 21, 1911.
Nobody claimed him at his passing but we remember him today. Rest in peace Old Mike. . . . . a Dusty Relic of Odd AR history.
Bob Denman is Emeritus Vice Chancellor for University Advancement at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. You can reach him at bgdenman@ualr.edu.
PHOTO CAPTION
Old Mike’s Funeral (Encyclopedia of Arkansas)
