Shiloh Museum: Five Hundred Thousand Faces of Ozark Life
Near Fayetteville, Arkansas
In eighteen eighty-one, a Nebraska boy named Guy Howard found an arrowhead in his family's garden. He was five years old. By the time his family moved to Springdale, Arkansas, by covered wagon in the eighteen nineties, the habit was already formed.
Howard spent the next six decades collecting artifacts, photographs, and documents from the Ozark hill country. By the nineteen twenties, neighbors were driving from across the region to see his collection. The city of Springdale purchased it in nineteen sixty-five and opened the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in nineteen sixty-eight, named for the pioneer community that became Springdale.
Today the museum holds the largest collection of historic photographs in Arkansas, more than five hundred thousand images, along with extensive research archives covering five Northwest Arkansas counties. It is a free museum in a two-acre wooded park, and it remains one of the most important repositories of Ozark life in the country.
