Stone Gardens : From Virginia to the Pope County -The violent path of Arkansas’s first Territorial Judge

Oakland Cemetery in Russellville is one of Pope County’s most significant historic landscapes. Established in the mid-19th century, it preserves the graves of the Arkansas River Valley’s early settlers, merchants, public officials, and civic founders.

More than a burial ground, it serves as a quiet archive of territorial ambition, frontier governance, and the personal costs of life on the edge of American expansion.

Among its most compelling monuments is the stone marking the resting place of Andrew Horatio Scott.

In 1881 his son, Captain John Rice Homer Scott, moved the remains of his parents here from Dover so the pioneer judge would rest among the town’s founders rather than in an earlier, more remote burial ground.

The monument stands as a quiet testament to a man who helped plant the legal foundations of Arkansas Territory—and whose volatile sense of honor twice ended in fatal violence.

Andrew Horatio Scott was born August 6, 1789, in Hanover County, Virginia, to Andrew Scott, a weaver who had emigrated from Scotland, and Elizabeth Ferguson.

Family tradition holds that the elder Andrew arrived in America as a boy after his parents died at sea, leaving him and his brothers to be bound out as apprentices. The younger Andrew grew up in a large household that included at least two brothers (one of them the attorney John Scott) and three sisters. In 1808 the family joined the westward migration into the Louisiana Purchase lands, settling in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri.

On November 5, 1811, at age 22, Scott married Eliza Jones (born January 10, 1794, in Kaskaskia, Illinois). They had several children, among them Captain John Rice Homer Scott (1813–1905), who later became a prominent Pope County merchant and public official; Eliza Harriet Scott (1818–1874); Augustus Scott (born 1820); Walter Ferguson Scott (born 1822); and Henry Clay Scott.

Eliza died on May 5, 1835, at the family place called Scotia in what is now Pope County. Andrew never remarried.

Scott received no formal college education. In the classic frontier tradition, he “read law” under his older brother John in Ste. Genevieve after the family’s arrival in 1808 and was practicing by 1811. In 1815 he moved his young family to Mine-à-Breton (present-day Potosi, Missouri), a booming lead-mining community.

There he used his growing influence to help establish the Potosi Academy--one of the earliest academies in the Missouri Territory—and served as a trustee alongside his father-in-law. His early public service began in the newly organized Missouri Territory: he became the first clerk of the Territorial House of Representatives, serving two terms.

In 1819 Missouri Territorial Governor William Clark commissioned him sheriff of Jefferson County--an appointment he barely held before a higher call arrived.

No record exists of Andrew Horatio Scott serving in the military. Unlike many of his contemporaries, including the man he later killed in a duel, he does not appear in War of 1812 rolls or subsequent militia service.

His path remained civilian, legal, and political from the start.

On March 3, 1819, President James Monroe appointed the 29-year-old Scott one of the first three judges of the Superior Court of the newly created Arkansas Territory--the highest court in the land and predecessor to the modern Arkansas Supreme Court. Scott was the first territorial official to report for duty at Arkansas Post on July 4, 1819, and helped organize the new government.

When the capital moved to Little Rock in 1821, he followed.

His judicial tenure was marked by both competence and controversy. Contemporaries praised the clarity of his written opinions. Yet in April 1824, an argument during a whist game at Arkansas Post--Scott believed fellow Superior Court Judge Joseph Selden had insulted a lady--escalated into a duel. After an initial apology failed to settle the matter, the two men crossed to the east bank of the Mississippi River opposite Helena on May 26, 1824.

Pistols were the weapons. Scott’s first shot struck Selden through the heart and lungs; Selden died within minutes. Scott was unharmed.

Dueling was illegal in the territory. Scott survived early attempts to remove him and finished his term, but when President John Quincy Adams renominated him in 1827, the Senate refused confirmation, citing the fatal duel. That same year Scott ran unsuccessfully for territorial delegate to Congress in a special election, receiving only 116 votes--a result widely attributed to the stain of the duel.

On May 31, 1828, he confronted General Edmund Hogan, who had defeated him in a legislative race and whom Scott accused of spreading lies. After Hogan knocked him down, Scott drew a sword-cane and fatally stabbed the larger man. Charged with murder, Scott was acquitted on grounds of self-defense.

Despite the scandals, he continued in public life. In 1827 he was appointed circuit judge for the First District. He settled on former Indian lands in what became Pope County, laid out the town of Scotia, and in 1829 was named the first county judge when Pope County was organized.

Scotia served briefly as the first permanent county seat. In 1833, the territorial legislature named the new Scott County in his honor. He later served as a delegate from Pope and Johnson counties to the 1836 Arkansas Constitutional Convention that prepared the way for statehood. His final official act was enumerating the 1850 federal census for Pope County.

Scott spent his later years more quietly as a lawyer and planter near Dover and Norristown. He died suddenly on March 13, 1851 (some sources list the 15th), at age 61 while on business in Norristown.

He was first buried beside Eliza at Dover. Thirty years later, their son moved both graves to Oakland Cemetery in Russellville, where a substantial monument still marks the site.

Andrew Horatio Scott remains one of the most vivid figures of Arkansas’s territorial era: a capable jurist who helped launch the new territory’s legal system, a founder of Pope County institutions, and a man whose quick temper and rigid code of personal honor twice left men dead.

His story, etched in the stones of Oakland Cemetery, is pure frontier Arkansas--`ambition, law, violence, and endurance bound together in one life and one historic landscape.