Stone Gardens: A Franklin County child grew into a well-respected (but controversal) member of the State House

In the shadowed folds of the Arkansas River valley, where the Big Mulberry Creek still cuts through the hills near Cass, a one-year-old girl arrived in 1878 with her parents and a growing brood of siblings, the third of what would become fifteen children.

Florence Emily McGraw, sometimes called Floy, had been born the previous May in Tate County, Mississippi, to Catherine Ophelia Babb McGraw and Daniel Murdock McGraw.

The family claimed a homestead along the creek, and the child who would later write of her life as a swift current grew up watching her father step into public roles that shaped Franklin County.

Daniel McGraw was appointed deputy sheriff, then elected county surveyor and held the post for twelve years, riding the ridges with his instruments to measure the new land. Later he rose to superintendent of the Western Coal and Mining Company mine at Denning, so the household knew both the quiet of farm life and the rhythm of the coal camps that drew immigrants and workers to Altus and the surrounding towns.

Florence attended the preparatory department of Central Collegiate Institute, the school that would become Hendrix College, and the Altus public schools before graduating in 1895 from Hiram and Lydia College in Altus with a master’s degree in English literature.

On July 1, 1897, she began work as a clerk in the Altus post office, her first steady employment in a town still finding its footing after the railroad and the mines. The following year she married John Sanders McRaven, a court reporter and typewriter salesman from Fort Smith, in a quiet ceremony on October 19, 1898.

They had three children: Catherine Gertrude, Charles Hampton, and John Sanders Jr. In 1903 the family moved to Little Rock when John became state manager for the Remington Typewriter Company, trading the river valley for the capital’s growing streets.

In Pulaski County, she threw herself into civic work. She served as an officer of the Pulaski Heights School Improvement Auxiliary and the Women’s Educational Aid Society, which raised funds to help worthy unmarried women obtain an education. She belonged to the Pulaski Heights Christian Church and the Bay View Club, chaired committees of the Little Rock and Arkansas Federation of Women’s Clubs, and was appointed head of the County Library Board.

She studied further at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, taking a six-week course under Professor Solomon Henry Clark of the University of Chicago and returning for several summer sessions. Those skills carried her into the arts. She directed dramatic productions at McRaven’s School of Expression, taught vocal expression at the Little Rock Conservatory, and gave oral interpretations of literature and original poetry.

One review called her as talented an elocutionist as Little Rock could boast. She helped found the Little Rock Drama League, served twice as president of the Arkansas Authors and Composers Society, and in 1916 collaborated with Bernie Babcock on a ninety-minute, one-woman performance of Babcock’s Mammy: A Drama, which she presented at the Chautauqua Hall of Philosophy and more than fifty times across Arkansas with support from the Churchill Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, of which she was a member.

She was also an aunt to the novelist Janice Holt Giles.

Though she was not deeply involved in the suffrage campaign, she welcomed the Nineteenth Amendment. She worked two years as an assistant juvenile probation officer under Jennie Erickson and later coordinated the county’s fifty school improvement associations.

From 1923 to 1925 she served as an inspector for the Arkansas Department of Labor and secretary of the Industrial Welfare Commission, focusing on child labor and minimum wage and hour rules for women. Governor Thomas J. Terral replaced her in September 1925, appointing his own sister to the post.

Before entering electoral politics, her only formal political role had been as an officer in the local Women of the Ku Klux Klan, where she helped vet and endorse candidates. In April 1926 she announced as a Democratic candidate for the Arkansas House of Representatives from Pulaski County.

She printed cards, drove a roadster to picnics, rallies, and barbecues, and spoke on the stump. An observer noted that she was not melodramatic nor spectacular, but with a wonderfully clear enunciation and a delivery simple and convincing, she was forceful and effective.

She placed second of twelve candidates in the Democratic primary for four at-large seats and finished third in the general election. She spent $47.50 on her 1928 campaign and was reelected, placing fourth of eighteen candidates in the primary.

In the House from 1927 to 1930 she worked on issues she knew well. She pushed to expand pensions for low-income mothers and to extend wage and hour protections to women in cotton mills. Serving on the Committee on Roads, she backed Governor John Martineau’s highway program.

She introduced legislation to abolish the death penalty and to limit corporal punishment at the state prison farm for women. In floor debates she opposed the Rotenberry Anti-Evolution bill and argued for allowing Sunday baseball in Little Rock. In 1930 she became the first woman to run for the Arkansas Senate, seeking one of two seats in District 10 covering Pulaski and Perry counties.

She finished fifth of eight candidates. She later said she was not surprised to be defeated, that more than one faction had informed her she would not go back, and that a newspaper had called her the Stormy Petrel of the Legislature.

After leaving the legislature, she served on the staff of Pulaski County Judge Ross Lawhon and was a delegate to the first Arkansas Woman’s Democratic Club convention in 1932. She resumed summer study at Chautauqua, wrote for the Arkansas Farmer, and through Senator Hattie Caraway and Bernie Babcock joined the WPA Arkansas Writers Project. She campaigned for Senator John L. McClellan and Governor Benjamin T. Laney.

She returned to work as a labor inspector for the state Department of Labor and continued until she retired at age seventy in 1947. In 1954 she published her autobiography, Swift Current, a reflective account of family roots, public life, and the decades she had lived.

She died on October 22, 1975, at the age of ninety-eight, and was buried in Oak Cemetery at Fort Smith.