Stores near the depot included a druggist, a pharmacy, several mercantile establishments, and an auction house. The Bank of Parkdale was established by 1905. In 1902, Parkdale was reincorporated as a second-class city. Sawmills were built to process cut timber, and the city grew rapidly. The name of the post office and of the city followed suit. Because the railroad also served the larger city of Poplar Bluff, Missouri, railroad officials named the depot Parkdale. The railroad through Poplar Bluff was completed in the early 1890s. Poplar Bluff incorporated as a town in 1889.
Following the war, the settlement was rebuilt, with stores, saloons, mills, a post office, and the Baptist church. On January 31, 1865, Federal troops raided Poplar Bluff, burning a distillery, a grist mill, and a large amount of cotton and corn. Ashley County, aside from providing soldiers, saw moderate activity, with one skirmish in the county in March 1864. Many area residents, including Butler and Morris, served in the Confederate army during the Civil War. A Masonic lodge opened there the same year. A Missionary Baptist church was established there in 1857.
The settlement that grew up around the steamboat landing was called Poplar Bluff because of a prominent grove of trees near the landing. A Methodist church had also been built in the area sometime in the 1850s. Morris’s son, John William Morris, worked as a clerk in Hughes’s store and later opened his own store. Some farmers were already working the land near the bayou at that time, including William Morris, John Harris, and William Butler. John Tillman Hughes built a store at the present location of Parkdale in 1857. Once a busy, prosperous, and even violent city, Parkdale has become a relatively quiet community in the twenty-first century. One of the oldest incorporated communities in Ashley County, Parkdale (formerly known as Poplar Bluff) has benefited from its location on Bayou Bartholomew and on the Missouri Pacific railroad (now the Union Pacific railroad).
0 kommentar(er)
