Our Arklahoma Heritage:The 1880 US census details a Barcelona community that didn't exist just ten years later
Elijah Thomas Tom Comstock settled the Lee Creek homestead that became the heart of the short lived Barcelona community in Crawford County, Arkansas, a place that sat on the left side of what is now Barcelona Road and close to the old line with Indian Territory.
Old timers recalled that around 1878 roughly seventy-five people lived there, most of them scattered along the farms that lined the creek. A small blacksmith shop and a general store served the settlement until both closed a few years after the Barcelona post office was discontinued and the mail moved to Uniontown.
Civil War troops had crossed the ground a number of times in the decade before the settlement took form, leaving little permanent mark beyond the memory of hoofprints and campfires. One local story held that white handlers assigned to bring troops from East Georgia during the Indian removal, men whose last name was Key or Keys, had left those parties and settled on land adjacent to Lee Creek, later sending back to Georgia for other family members.
Tom was born about December 22, 1838, in Perry County, Tennessee, the son of Ephraim F. H. Comstock and Nancy Goodman. His family moved to McDonald County, Missouri, by the early 1850s, and there he married Miranda Jane Brown. He served the Confederacy under General Joseph O. Shelby, then before the close of the war was assigned to Indian special services and mustered out near a place called Oichita in the Chickasaw Nation.
After a brief stay in Texas, he returned and by about 1870 had settled the Lee Creek place that would briefly be known as Barcelona. In 1888 he became the first postmaster of the Barcelona office, which operated until 1896. In 1882 he was elected to the Arkansas legislature, where he was credited with work that benefited Crawford County, and the same year he helped charter the Uniontown Masonic Lodge.
The 1889 Goodspeed history described his fine residence on Lee’s Creek, about one and one fourth miles from the Cherokee Nation line. He died on April 29, 1917, near Uniontown and was buried the next day in the old home cemetery on the homestead, the small plot also known as the Comstock family cemetery or the Barcelona cemetery.
Among the children raised on that place was Clinden, known as Den, who was born on February 8 or 18, 1873. Den grew up on the homestead and by the 1910 census was listed as a farmer living with his father in Union Township. In April 1905 he married Birdie Chadwick of Van Buren, who had earlier been married to Francis Houghton.
Among their children was a son, Thomas Denzil, called Dink, who died in 1911 at about six years of age and was buried in the family plot. Den himself died on February 9 or 29, 1912, at the age of thirty nine. He was laid to rest in the same cemetery, where his marker carried the lines A precious one from us has gone. A voice we love is still. A place is vacant in our home which he can only fill.
The same ground later received another son, Hardy, known as Tack, who was born on September 14, 1877, in Barcelona. Hardy farmed and kept a store in the Uniontown area. On August 24, 1936, he was shot and killed in his field a few miles from Uniontown by a neighbor, Chester D. Lemon.
Lemon surrendered to the sheriff and claimed that after an argument Hardy had attacked him with a rock while he was on horseback.
The charge of first-degree murder was tried in Van Buren and ruled justifiable homicide. Family stories later spoke of long-standing bad blood, including claims of an affair between Hardy and Lemon’s wife, and noted that Lemon had previously shot another man.
Hardy’s funeral was held near Uniontown with officers of the Uniontown Masonic lodge taking part, and he was buried in the Comstock family cemetery beside Den, their parents, and other relatives.
The quiet plot on the old homestead remains the lasting mark of the Barcelona community and the Comstock family that farmed along Lee Creek near the territorial line.
