My Genealogy Hound

Seth J. Howel is a very highly esteemed old resident of Clarksville, Ark., and during the long term of years that he has resided in this section he has never been known to do a dishonest act, or to willfully defraud his fellow-man. He was born in Logan County, Ky., in 1810, to John Howel, who came to Arkansas on January 2, 1837, and died in Yell County ten years later, being a resident of the town of Danville at that time. Seth J. Howel was educated in Kentucky and from 1840 to 1863 he sold goods at Pittsburgh on the Arkansas River, but moved, at the close of the war, to Little Rock, and farmed near that place. He was married in 1831 to Miss Willis, of Kentucky, but while a resident of Little Rock in 1867, she left him a widower with two children to care for: John, who is now a stock-raiser of Madison County, Tex., and Sarah, widow of Mr. Jordan, of that place. Mr. Howel was married, a second time, in 1870, to Mrs. Willis, a widow of the brother of his first wife, and in the spring of the same year came back to Clarksville and erected the residence in which he is now spending a serene old age. He and his wife are members of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, and throughout his life he has been quite an active politician, being deeply interested in all the important movements of the times. He was a delegate to the State Constitutional Convention in 1874, and is an earnest advocate of Prohibition, and has done much to aid the cause of temperance in his town. He is the first man who drove a coach on this road, and also the first one to bring a Troy coach to the town. On his arrival in this place in 1837, there was but one house in what is now the nourishing town of Clarksville, and as he has resided here the greater part of his life, he has seen almost the entire growth and development of this section. He was in the coach mail business from Little Rock to Fort Smith for twenty years, the name of his partner being Peter Hanger.