Stone Gardens: Despite the lack of a headstone 19th century jurist rests in Board Camp Cemetery in Polk County

Board Camp Cemetery, 9.5 miles east of Mena on Highway 8, lies the final resting place of one of Polk County’s earliest judicial architects, Judge Benjamin Shaver , though you won’t find his name on a headstone.

.Born in Tennessee in 1813, Shaver arrived in the Ouachita Mountains in the 1830s, just as Polk County was carved from Sevier County in 1844.

A farmer, surveyor, and self-taught jurist, he rose to become county judge during Reconstruction (1868–1874) and later a state legislator, guiding the fledgling county through chaos: two courthouse fires in Dallas (the original county seat), Confederate loyalties, and the struggle to rebuild after the Civil War.

Polk’s first log courthouse burned shortly after construction in the 1840s. A second wooden structure followed, only to be destroyed by fire in 1878. With each blaze, birth, death, and land records vanished.

Shaver, serving on the bench during the second fire, helped rebuild the system from scratch. He oversaw the construction of a brick courthouse in 1884 (cost: $4,500) and pushed for fireproof record-keeping including elevated ledgers and iron safes that saved what little remained.

His court handled everything from timber disputes to freedmen’s claims in a county where only seven people were enslaved in 1860

Though his grave lacks a modern marker, Shaver’s name endures in stone and history:

• The Judge Benjamin Shaver House (701 12th St., Mena) \, a grand Victorian with a Palladian window and wraparound porch — was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1993.

• He is listed as a “historic person” in the nomination for the Ebenezer Monument (1936), a fieldstone pillar in downtown Mena that once held a time capsule and stood as a symbol of local resistance to radical labor schools like Commonwealth College.

  
  

  Despite a confirmed burial in Board Camp Cemetery behind the Primitive Baptist Church that was documented in 1980s surveys and History of Polk County (1988) no headstone or memorial exists in Board Camp.

  
  

  The site, donated by local families in the 1870s, holds unmarked pioneer graves eroded by time and Ouachita floods.

Benjamin Shaver died in 1880, just 16 years before Mena became the new county seat. His unmarked grave in Board Camp is a quiet reminder: in Polk County, history isn’t always carved in stone but is sometimes contained within the land itself.

Board Camp Cemetery is open to the public, behind the church. Look in the older sections near the tree line where Shaver is thought to be buried..