Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

OBU Obtains Grant From AGFC

The Pete Parks Center for Regional Studies at Ouachita Baptist University recently received a grant from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission to do a historical study in the Rick Evans/Grandview Prairie Conservation Education Center and Wildlife Management Area in Hempstead County.

"We received the grant from the game and fish so that we could survey a 5,000-acre former plantation in south Arkansas," said Dr. Trey Berry, assistant professor of history and executive director of the center.

"The land is a unique piece of property that contains fossils, native American mounds and unique plant life," he said. "It is one of the few places on the earth that is called a black land prairie."

The grant, Berry said, will allow Ouachita students and faculty a non-conventional on-site study approach to the property, which is located near Columbus.

Work on the site has already begun, Berry said. "This past summer nine Ouachita students began working on the project in helping with surface surveying. We plan to go back in January and take more students.

"Game and fish basically wants us to tell the history of the site so that it can be made into an interpretive park for the state," said Berry. "They purchased the land as a wildlife management and ecological education site."

The parks center will submit its findings of the land to the Game and Fish Commission in May of 1999.

Three other faculty members are working with Berry on the project. They are Lavell Cole, professor of history; Dr. Ray Granade, professor of history and director of library services; and Dr. Tom Greer, the Clarence and Bennie Sue Anthony professor of Bible and humanities.

The center, founded in 1981as the OBU Institute for Regional Studies, was renamed the Pete Parks Center for Regional Studies due to a large endowment given to the center in 1991. The primary focus of the center is to identify, collect, preserve and disseminate information on the culture of south Arkansas, north Louisiana and east Texas.