Jonesboro, AR — (JonesboroRightNow.com) — April 22, 2025 — Two Jonesboro natives are working to bring their idea of a nonconventional Craighead County/Jonesboro Museum to life.

The project is headed by Claudia C. Shannon and Dr. Ruth Hawkins.

Shannon has been the restoration director for three different A-State Museum projects as well as other sites owned by the State of Arkansas, while Hawkins serves as the emeritus executive director of Arkansas State University Heritage Sites. Both have worked on the planning and development of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center in Piggott, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union Museum in Tyronza, and Lakeport Plantation south of Lake Village.

“Ruth Hawkins and I have dreamed about a museum in Craighead County for a long time,” Shannon said.

Shannon said she wants to tell Craighead County’s history through its buildings. She said she’d like to create a free website similar to Wikipedia, where users could add information about the history of their home or about another building in the county. She said the project is still in the research phase at the moment.

“We never wanted to compete with the ASU Museum. That wasn’t our purpose. We wanted to tell it in a different manner,” Shannon said. “After learning of this manner, it made perfect sense, because if you look at the Facebook pages for Craighead County history, people get so excited saying, ‘Well, so and so lived there’… ‘No, he didn’t. He lived over here.’ They all love to talk about what they remember and where it was.”

Shannon said a volunteer committee of moderators to monitor the website and try the make sure any information is correct would be required. Another way to verify information, she said, would be to have submitters follow U.S. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places forms, which follow the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards. The forms are available online for free.

“They have a form for registering structures, but they have a different form for different kinds of structures,” Shannon said. “We could tell people that we want them to follow those forms and then if they get the opportunity to put theirs on the National Register, they would’ve already worked on the form.”

She said the committee would also help to teach people how to do the research, but she wouldn’t want them to be responsible for all the research.

They are looking for support and touring local clubs, including the Craighead County Historical Society and the Rotary Club of Jonesboro, to share their dream.

“We would have to have a little money because we probably would want to start a 501(c)(3) and we probably would need to pay somebody to put together the software for us. But other than that, we could do this slowly and teach people how to do it,” she said. “We are asking people to get all involved in it and be excited about it.”

Shannon and Hawkins have had the idea for the museum for over 20 years. They originally presented plans for a Craighead County/Jonesboro Museum to be located in the original Barton Lumber Company building in 2002; however, the idea was rejected out of concern that it would draw resources from A-State’s campus museum.

Then again, when the Rotary Club of Jonesboro Centennial Plaza was being developed across from the Forum Theater downtown in 2019, Shannon said she talked with many others about forming a museum; however, without voter support, the tax bill that could have been used to help fund the project failed at the polls.

Shannon said for now the most important thing is to get somebody to design the software, however they do not know the cost of the software development yet. Although they’re not looking to pursue grants at this time, Shannon said they would like to in the future. They also have not been active in pursuing donations.

“All the different houses in Jonesboro tell those stories. If you follow the house, then you will follow the people. It fascinates me and I think we could do it and maybe in five or ten years we’d have so much that we would want to go ahead and have a building, but the building would only give us a place to do research together and hold events or something else,” she said. “I’d just like to get everybody excited about doing the research first.”

Editor’s Note: JRN had not been able to contact Hawkins for further comments at the time of this article.