The Hoo-Hoo Monument

This is one of the stranger monuments in Arkansas, and it has cats on top of it. In eighteen ninety-two, a group of lumbermen stranded in the railroad town of Gurdon, killing time in a hotel, founded a fraternal order with a name they invented on the spot, the Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo. They chose as their emblem a black cat with its tail curled into the shape of the number nine, drawn from the old saying about a cat's nine lives.

The number nine ran through everything they did, the jurisdictions, the committees, the rituals. In nineteen oh nine they raised this granite and bronze monument, designed by the sculptor George Zolnay with Egyptian-revival details and topped by two of those tail-curled Hoo-Hoo cats. The order still keeps its international headquarters here in Gurdon.