LAKE VILLAGE — Robert Patrick Bender will be at the Lakeport Plantation to discuss the life and career of Lake Village’s Confederate Brigadier General Daniel Harris Reynolds.
Bender is the editor of “Worthy of The Cause for Which They Fight: The Civil War Diary of Brigadier General Daniel Harris Reynolds, 1861-1865” (University of Arkansas Press, 2011). A book signing will follow Bender’s talk.
Reynolds, a lawyer and Ohio native, put down roots in Lake Village in the late 1850s. At the onset of the Civil War, he raised “The Chicot Rangers,” who fought in both the Trans-Mississippi West and in the East. Reynolds’ diary covers the entirety of the Civil War (1861 to 1865) and consistently documents the harsh realities of battle, the shifting fortunes of war, the personal conflicts that sometimes divided the soldiers, and a committed Southerner coming to grips with the realities of defeat. After the war he returned to Lake Village where he lived at his “Lakeside” home until his death in 1902.
Bender, a tenured instructor of history at Eastern New Mexico State University-Roswell with master’s and doctoral degrees in history from the University of Arkansas, adds much to Reynolds’ narrative by identifying the people, places, and events described, offering an astonishing amount of detail about the general’s world. Bender is also the author of “Like Grass before the Scythe: The Life and Death of Sgt. William Remmel, 121st New York Infantry.” Copies of “Worthy of the Cause for Which They Fight” will be available for purchase at $35, cash or check only please. Call or e-mail to reserve a book at 870-265-6031 or lakeport.ar@gmail.com.
This free event is sanctioned by the Arkansas Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission, which commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Civil War in Arkansas by sanctioning events, encouraging research and education programs related to Civil War Arkansas, and preserving the sites that witnessed the Civil War in Arkansas.
The Lakeport Plantation is an Arkansas State University Heritage Site. Constructed around 1859, it is Arkansas’s only remaining antebellum plantation home along the Mississippi River. The plantation was donated to Arkansas State University in 2001 by the Sam Epstein Angel family. After more than five years of restoration, the plantation opened as a museum and educational center in September 2007.