1870s plantation home mourned

BLACKTON - Richard Butler Jr. is in mourning.

For the past seven years, he and a business partner have poured love, sweat and cash into restoring a three-story plantation home that’s stood for more than 140 years in a rural Monroe County field just off U.S. 49.

But a fire swept it all away last week, turning the dream project into a pile of debris and ash.

An insurance check can’t bring any of it back - nothing can.

“I am really still in shock,” said Butler, a Little Rock historian and preservationist who has restored many historic buildings around the state.

“We were just about 95 percent complete on the exterior renovation, then we were going to move inside. I am truly grieving right now.”

Butler said his business partner, Jeremy Carroll of Little Rock, isn’t speaking publicly about the blaze.

It took firefighters from the East Monroe County Volunteer Fire Department 15 minutes or more to get to the house Monday because they were more than 10 miles away. By then, there was little that could be done to save the house.

The fire likely started in an attic electrical breaker box in the rear of the house, Butler said.

He wouldn’t talk about what’s next or whether he would rebuild.

“I can’t predict the future,” Butler said. “I just don’t know right now.”

The 1870s Italianate-style house is known as Palmer’s Folly, named after its builder, John Coleman Palmer.

Butler said the name likely came after Palmer - a Civil War veteran, lawyer and a newspaper publisher - pledged to build a vast garden beside his dream home, designed to hold every type of plant native to Arkansas. “Or it could have been that people thought it was crazy to build such an ornate mansion in the middle of a field,” Palmer said. “These are the two theories that we think created the name Palmer’s Folly.”

Many historians considered the house to be one of the most important examples of Italianate architecture in Arkansas.

Vanessa McKuin, executive director of the Historic Preservation Alliance of Arkansas, said the loss of Palmer’s Folly “is devastating to the state. It’s one of those places … that seem out of place, jarring, when you first see them. They get your attention as a remnant of something that used to be.”

News of the fire spread quickly on social media.

That’s how Mark Christ, community outreach director for the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, said he learned of the blaze. He yelled to his wife, who was in another room, when he saw a picture of flames shooting from the house’s second story.

“It just hit me in the gut,” Christ said. “I could not believe what I was seeing. Anytime you lose a structure with this kind of history is sad.”

Jesse Hall, a Cape Girardeau, Mo., real-estate developer, grew up just down the road from Palmer’s Folly.

He and his friends used to ride their bikes by the house, pretending that ghouls filled the hallways and wondering how it looked inside.

“We used to call it the haunted house,” Hall said. “And all the old-timers in the community would tell us stories about the house. We would ask about it in wonderment. It really was sort of a magical place.”

Hall said if Butler and his business partner had not purchased the property, he would have.

When he heard about the fire, he put his head in his hands in disbelief.

“Someone sent me an e-mail about it,” Hall said. “Let’s just say I was glad I was sitting down. I saw the house for the last time [just recently]. I was so excited about the renovation, and I was looking forward to seeing the inside for the first time. Now it’s gone. It’s just unbelievable.”