Stone Gardens: Harrison lumber and hardware magnet helped shaped the economic viability of Boone County
- Dennis McCaslin
- Dec 8
- 1 min read
George Hammerschmidt was born on September 19, 1856, in Quincy, Illinois, the son of German immigrants. His father, August, was a machinist, and George learned the trade early.
In 1881 he married Anna Maria Siegle, who had come from Metzingen, Württemberg, Germany. They had at least six children: Edna, Erma, Bessie, Fern, Arthur Paul, and one other.
The family moved several time, first to Mendon, Missouri, where George operated a hardware store, then to Clinton, Missouri, where he ran a wholesale-retail business, before settling in Harrison, around 1911.
That year George founded the Hammerschmidt Lumber Company on the north side of the Harrison square. Boone County was still heavily timbered, and the new yard supplied lumber, doors, windows, and building materials for houses, stores, and the expanding Missouri & North Arkansas Railroad.
His son Arthur Paul became manager and grew the operation. Arthur and his wife Junie Mildred Taylor raised five children in Harrison; the youngest, John Paul Hammerschmidt (born May 4, 1922), would later serve 26 years in Congress.
George Hammerschmidt died in Harrison on May 12, 1926, at the age of 69. He is buried in Rose Hill Cemetery (Block 33, Lot 2, Space 7), the same historic ground that holds Harrison’s other founders and early merchants.
The lumber company he started remained a family business for decades and helped construct much of the town’s early-20th-century core
. Though his name is not widely known outside Boone County, the quiet German immigrant who saw opportunity in the Ozark forests laid the economic foundation that allowed his grandson to become one of Arkansas’s best-known public servants.
