Long after her death in 1927, Sarah Caroline Henson’s nickname, “Callie,” became a part of Fayetteville’s place names.
Sarah was born October 18, 1839, in Washington County to Tom A. and Sultana Barr Gregg.
At about the age of 14, she married Thomas Andrew Henson. During the Civil War, they left Northwest Arkansas for safer ground in Missouri. At the war’s end, they returned to Arkansas, driving a wagon down the old Missouri Road. Upon passing through a small prairie near the present-day boundary between Fayetteville and Springdale, Callie told her husband that this prairie was where she wanted her home.
And so that’s where they settled.
The 1870 census showed that two of her children had been born before the Civil War started, two were born during it and one had arrived after the war, presumably when they had resettled in Arkansas. But the children kept coming over a nearly 20-year span:
- Alexander B. in about 1854
- William A. in about 1861
- James A. in about 1864
- Jonathan in about 1866
- Lydia A. in about 1871
- Charles H. in about 1874
- Solon C. in about 1877
- Lillian in early 1880
- And one more daughter, Minnie, in 1883
Caroline Henson died May 7, 1927, of cerebral apoplexy and was buried the same day at Son’s Chapel Cemetery. She was 87 years old.
In 2009, volunteers of the Fayetteville Natural Heritage Association began restoring 27 acres of the Henson farm in the northeastern end of Lake Fayetteville Park to its original upland prairie form. They removed non-native invasive species and encouraged old prairie species such as bluestem and Indian grass.
In 2012, the prairie section of was officially named Callie’s Prairie. In the years since, the city’s Public Works Department has conducted periodic prescribed burns to continue returning the farmland to prairie status.