Our Arklahoma Heritage: A Huntsville merchant of moderate means may have provided shelter for runaway slaves

Samuel E. Kenner

On a November day in 1850, the census taker walked the muddy streets of Huntsville and stopped at a young merchant’s door. Samuel E. Kenner was twenty-nine, Tennessee-born, Franklin County if later keepers of the record are right, and newly married.

He and Matilda Elizabeth Foreste, eighteen and from Missouri, had been wed on July 21, 1850, over the line in Carroll County. The enumerator wrote merchant beside Samuel’s name and put six hundred dollars against real estate.

That was not the largest fortune on the square. Other shopkeepers listed eighteen hundred or twenty-five hundred. But it was enough to mark a man who had already found his place in a county seat of stores, a hotel, blacksmiths, and a newspaper, a town that still smelled of new pine and woodsmoke.

He came out of an old Virginia line that had drifted west through Hawkins County, Tennessee. His father, whose given name was Colonel Eskridge Kenner, was buried in 1858 in Kenner Cemetery in Carroll County. His mother, Dorcas Burem, had died the year before. The Eskridge in Samuel’s name reached back to Margaret Eskridge of the Northern Neck.

The Kenners had been planters and county men long before anyone laid out a square in Madison County. By the time Samuel kept a shop in Huntsville he was a second-generation Ozark settler with Tidewater memory and Tennessee dirt in the same signature. Among his brothers and sisters were Mary Burum Kenner McCracken, Sophia Eskridge Kenner Seaman, and Lt. James Wick Kenner.

The shop was not a lone counter. Later notes put him in business with J. C. Pitner, with Caugan and Forrest, and with Warren Sams in the township of Huntsville. Warren Sams was already selling goods in the same town when the 1850 enumerator came through. A dry-goods room of that generation looked like barrels on the floor and shelves to the ceiling.

Samuel’s own building is gone. The type is not.

The marriage filled a house. Jora Elizabeth came in 1851, then Susan Clintonen, Dorcas, Howard, Samuella, William H., a boy listed as Polter, and others. Matilda’s obituary would later say they had twelve children together. The last arrived after Samuel was already in the ground.

In 1870 the family was counted in War Eagle Township, the country around Huntsville. Between those two census years the town lived through a war that tore Madison County in half.

Huntsville never saw a set-piece battle. It saw almost everything else. Isaac Murphy, who lived there and later became Arkansas’s Reconstruction governor, had been the lone delegate to vote against secession. Guerrillas used the hollows. Both armies passed through.

On January 10, 1863, Union cavalry took nine local men from the guardhouse and shot them on the Vaughn farm a mile northeast of town. Eight died. Samuel Kenner was not among the named dead.

What he was doing that winter is no longer only a guess. Three letters he wrote to Matilda between 1860 and 1865 sit at the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies in Little Rock. The finding aid attaches those letters to Prince Camille de Polignac and to Polignac’s Texas Brigade.

That catalog note lines up with a later veteran’s identification on his grave page: Company A, 31st Texas Cavalry, Confederate States Army.

Hawpe’s 31st Texas Cavalry was raised in early 1862, mostly around Dallas County. It marched into Arkansas that June, fought at Newtonia and McGuire’s Store, went into the line dismounted at Prairie Grove in December 1862, moved to Louisiana in 1863, and later served under Polignac at Stirling’s Plantation, Mansfield, Pleasant Hill, and Yellow Bayou.

An Arkansas merchant in a Texas cavalry regiment is less strange than it first sounds. The 31st was in his own state in the autumn and winter of 1862. A man of forty could enlist where the horses were, not only where he paid taxes.

A compiled service card under his full name has not been reproduced online. The unit identification rests on the letter file and on that veteran’s note, which is the strongest public attribution now in view.

Further research reveals Kenner may have been a member of the Arkansas Peace Society , which was a secret Unionist network. Essentially, if he conscripted into the unit shortly after the APS was founded, he could have been an implanted spy.

Hundreds were arrested; some were hanged; others were pushed into Confederate companies. Those who survived became natural sources once Union posts existed along the Arkansas

Family memory says more than the printed rosters have yet been allowed to say. The story handed down is that Kenner hid runaway slaves in his store and that the building was burned for it. No newspaper abstract, county history, or published massacre account names him as a station keeper.

What the record does say is that the first courthouse and much of the rest of Huntsville burned during the war, that the greater portion of the town was destroyed, and that business of every kind was suspended. County records left with the Union army and were later lost. In that climate a store could vanish in a night for forage, spite, guerrilla fire, or a neighbor’s rumor.

The hiding of people in a storeroom is possible. It is also the sort of tale a family keeps when the square really did go up in smoke and when loyalties could get a man killed. Until those three letters are read in full, the Underground Railroad chapter stays oral history set against a documented ruin.

Samuel came home, or stayed, long enough to be counted again in 1870. He died in Huntsville on May 22, 1871. He was forty-nine.

The stone in Huntsville Cemetery is spare and broken in half: S E Kenner, with a birth date cut as September 12, 1821, though later compilers prefer September 21, 1821.

Matilda was pregnant. In July she bore a son and gave him the full name, Samuel Eskridge Kenner Jr.

The boy grew up, left Arkansas, and died in San Diego in 1945. William H. Kenner, another son, died in 1918. Susan Clintonen Kenner Coker lived until 1936. Matilda lived until 1923.

What remains is a merchant of modest recorded means, a partner on a square that burned, a husband who wrote home through the war years, a father whose last child never knew him, and, on the best evidence now in public view, a Confederate cavalryman of Company A, 31st Texas Cavalry, in the brigade the archivists wrote beside his name.

The rest, the wealth remembered as moderate, the store remembered as a hiding place, waits in a small manuscript folder in Little Rock and in the stories people still tell when they say the name Kenner in Madison County.