Stone Gardens: Appointment as a special deputy in 1929 led to the same-day death of a Yell County man
Today in Fort Smith maintains a database of 139 officers killed in the line of duty across western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma, and the site tells their stories on alternating days as part of regular coverage of fallen officers from the River Valley, Northwest Arkansas, and eastern Oklahoma
Many f those officers rest in local cemeteries, and on a recent trip through Yell County one of those memorials turned up at Chalybeate Springs Cemetery near Danville.
The modest rural burial ground sits near the old community of the same name, a place once known for its cold iron-bearing springs. Chalybeate refers to water rich in iron salts that earlier generations believed carried healing properties.
The cemetery holds both marked stones and unmarked graves, a quiet hillside plot that has served families in the western part of Yell County for generations. Among the Thacker family markers there is the stone for Malachi Thomas Thacker.
Thacker was born December 25, 1893, in Belleville in Yell County, the son of George Washington Thacker and Cassa L. Dilbeck. His father, who died in 1927, is also buried at Chalybeate Springs. Malachi grew up in the rural Arkansas River Valley and Ozark foothills country and later worked as a United States postal carrier, a trusted local role that took him regularly across the roads and routes of the county.
On the afternoon of December 27, 1929, he was appointed a special deputy of the Yell County Sheriff’s Office. Special deputies were often sworn for particular duties when regular officers needed extra hands.
That day Thacker joined Deputies Robert Gatlin and Arthur “Poss” Mitchell on a call to the Waltreak community west of Danville. Reports said a mentally ill juvenile was causing disturbances at the boy’s home, and the officers went to serve a warrant and take him into custody.
While the deputies were placing handcuffs on the boy, the father opened a door into the room and fired a shotgun, striking Thacker. The postal carrier, only hours into his special-deputy service, was killed at the age of 36. He left a wife, four children, four brothers, and a sister.
Thacker’s name appears among the fallen officers remembered by the Yell County Sheriff’s Office during National Police Week ceremonies, alongside others who died in earlier and later decades.
His stone at Chalybeate Springs stands as one more marker in the long list of local officers whose names and stories the database continues to preserve. The cemetery itself remains a quiet place where family history and public service rest side by side among the hills of Yell County.
