Piggot, AR

A Hemingway Haven

You won’t find traces of Elvis in this small town at the northeastern edge of the Arkansas Delta. But Piggott has its own legendary ghosts, just the same.

The most notable is a literary giant, who—like Elvis—was famous enough to acquire a nickname. But to residents of Piggott, Papa Hemingway was known simply as Ernest, husband of local resident Pauline Pfeiffer.

“He once brought my mother some ducks he’d shot,” recalls Jim Richardson, a regular of the “3 o’clock coffee club” that gathers in the backroom of Jim Forrest’s Enchanted Forrest Main Street gift shop. An opened bag of sugar-free truffles lies next to an unwrapped chocolate bar as four men lean across the table to hear Richardson continue his Hemingway commentary.

The anecdote prompts other 3 o’clockers to chime in with other Hemingway stories: that photographs of the writer—displayed alongside the Piggott Library’s collection of Hemingway first editions—look “just like Clark Gable,” or that he missed the world premiere of A Farewell to Arms held at Piggott’s old Franklin Theater.

The 3 o’clockers seem proud of their town’s Hemingway connection. But they’d rather talk about Piggott’s other distinguishing characteristics: its 13 churches (in a town with a population of only 3,894) and the fact that it contains Clay County’s only traffic light; the unique geological formation known as Crowley’s Ridge, a narrow strip rising 100-250 feet above Delta flatland and running from Cape Girardeau, Mo., through Piggott, to Helena, Ark.; and Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd, filmed on location in Piggott. Then, of course, is the 3 o’clock hour—the town’s best time of day.

Still, Hemingway’s presence in Piggott remains a strong one, and nowhere is that presence stronger than at the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum located a few blocks west of downtown. The town’s only remaining Pfeiffer, Pauline’s sister-in-law, Matilda, still lives behind the museum in a Tudor-style house where part of Kazan’s movie was filmed.

Operated as an outreach of nearby Jonesboro’s Arkansas State University, the museum opened July 4, 1999, in time for Hemingway’s birthday centennial. It pays homage not only to Piggott’s most famous part-time resident, but also to patriarch Paul Pfeiffer’s six-member family—no doubt, Piggott’s most influential.

Pfeiffer, partner in a prosperous St. Louis chemical company, achieved local prominence soon after moving to Piggott in 1913. He was responsible for planting most of the area’s bottomland in cotton. The large, white neoclassic farmhouse overlooking Pfeiffer’s surrounding property became an instant symbol of his family’s dominance. It wasn’t until 1927, however, that the house gained a different kind of stature.

For the next 13 years—the years of daughter Pauline’s marriage to Ernest, his second of four—the Pfeiffer house would be a haven for Hemingway. On numerous occasions, he slept surrounded by the rose-colored glow of Pauline’s pink girlhood bedroom. Down the hall, at the top of the second-story landing, the sickroom where Ernest tended to his wife and children after they fell ill over a Christmas holiday gave rise to one of his “Piggott” short stories, A Day’s Wait. Outside, in the rustic barn his sister-in-law, Virginia, helped convert into a writing studio, Hemingway penned portions of A Farewell to Arms—a book he dedicated to one of his benefactors: Pauline’s Uncle Gus.

Later, Hemingway’s studio/barn was where Rosemary Janes’ family stored many of the Pfeiffers’ furnishings. The Janeses bought the house and most of its contents in 1950. A retired teacher, Janes now serves as the museum’s education coordinator, scheduling Hemingway-related workshops for educators as well as the general public on such topics as the Pfeiffers’—and Piggott’s—influence on Hemingway’s writing.

As to what it’s like to see her childhood home turned into a museum, the normally garrulous Janes turns as curt as Hemingway was known to be. “It’s just a hoot,” she says. “That’s all I can say.”

Margaret Dornaus is a regular contributor to American Profile.

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