Stone Gardens: Howard Elementary and the original Fort Smith Masonic Lodge were built by Rudolph Xavier Metzger
On a quiet rise inside Calvary Cemetery in Fort Smith, a shin-high wrought-iron fence still hems in a family plot. Several graves lie inside that low iron border, and a massive stone marks the ground with a single word, "Metzger."
The name belongs to Rudolph Xaver Metzger, who was born October 16, 1851, in Staufen, Baden, Germany, the son of a joiner, carpenter, and cabinetmaker who taught the boy the trade that would carry him across an ocean. He died January 14, 1929, in Altus, Franklin County, Arkansas, at seventy-seven, and was brought back to Fort Smith for burial among the Catholic dead of Sebastian County.
He learned his craft in Baden, married Amelia Straub there about 1875, and in March 1881 left Germany for America with a young family already in tow. He worked a year in Centralia, Illinois, then reached Fort Smith on April 16, 1882, and opened a contracting business of his own.
The 1889 county history that recorded him while he was still in mid-career said he had been permanently identified with the building interests of the place ever since. He lived at 720 Bryned Street. He belonged to St. Bonifacius Roman Catholic Church and to the Catholic Knights.
Fort Smith in those years was throwing up houses, stores, and public rooms as fast as timber and brick could be laid. Metzger’s name attached itself to two civic landmarks in particular.
One was the Howard school-house. Howard had begun as a Freedmen’s Bureau school for Black children after the Civil War. In 1886 a new four-room building opened at 813 North Eighth Street, and the same county sketch that listed Metzger as contractor and builder named him as the man who put that school-house up.
The campus later flooded, moved, and grew into the Howard Elementary that still stands in the district, but the 1886 rooms were the work of a German joiner’s son who had been in town only four years. The other credit in that 1889 account was the Grand Masonic Temple, then counted among the finest buildings in Fort Smith. The lodge hall that later burned in 1919, the Baer Memorial
Temple at North Sixth and C Streets, was the Masonic home of that generation. A far larger Egyptian Revival temple at North Eleventh and B would rise in 1927 through 1929 and be dedicated in September 1929, months after Metzger’s death. Whether he framed the earlier hall or only some of its successor work, the city’s own published record already tied his hammer to Masonic stone before the century turned.
Amelia died in Fort Smith on December 29, 1886, and was buried at Calvary. Their children, born on both sides of the Atlantic, included Rudolph Jr., Maria Catherine who became Mary Limberg, Anne Amelia who became Anne Corrotto, and Theresa Margaret who became Theresa Sparks. On August 16, 1887, he married Margarita Geheb, called Maggie, a Fort Smith girl born August 15, 1862, to Bavarian parents.
She died July 27, 1899.
The daughters of that second household included Edith Elizabeth Thompson, Cecilia Dora Neal, Veronica Josephine Toller, and Philomena Bertha Muntzel, women whose married names would carry the family into the middle of the twentieth century.
In 1902 he married Wilhelmina Haegger, who outlived him by only months in 1929 and shares the plot.
He died not in the city he had helped build but in Altus, up the river valley in Franklin County, and the body came home to Calvary. The plot is still easy to find if you look for the low iron and the oversized family stone
. The fence does not rise much past the shin. It simply holds the ground together, several graves inside it, the name Metzger cut large enough to be read from the path.
The school he raised on North Eighth Street educated children for decades after the flood of 1943 forced a move. The Masonic rooms he was credited with building gave way to fire and then to a temple finished the same year he died.
What maintains as his legacy,, without argument, is the iron, the stone, and the German contractor who arrived on April 16, 1882, and spent the rest of his working life making Fort Smith stand a little higher.
