In this episode of the underview, we travel to the southern edge of Washington County to explore Cane Hill—one of the earliest white settlements in Northwest Arkansas—and speak with Vanessa McKuin, Executive Director of Historic Cane Hill. Vanessa brings her personal and professional insight as a preservationist and native Arkansan to help us understand how this small community became a cultural, educational, and historical crossroads. From its founding by Cumberland Presbyterians to its role along the Trail of Tears, its high population of enslaved people, and its ambitious effort to become a center of education, Cane Hill reveals how many threads of Arkansas history converge in one seemingly quiet place.
We uncover stories of resilience and contradiction: the founding of Cane Hill College in the 1850s; its destruction during the Civil War; the reemergence as Arkansas’s first co-ed college; and the often-overlooked Black community of Happy Hollow that existed just a mile away. Vanessa also shares the challenges and triumphs of modern preservation, including efforts to recover stories of enslaved people and Black students who later desegregated Fayetteville schools. What emerges is not only a sense of Cane Hill’s significance, but a larger reflection on what gets remembered, what gets preserved, and what wholeness might look like for a rural place with such a layered past.
https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-historic-cane-hill-vanessa-mckuin
About the underview:
The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.
Website: theunderview.com
Follow us on Instagram: @underviewthe
Host: @mikerusch
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