My Genealogy Hound

F. P. Hughes, farmer, Murfreesboro, Ark. Mr. Hughes is recognized as a careful, energetic agriculturist of this community, and by his advanced ideas and progressive habits has done not a little for the farming elements hereabouts. He owes his nativity to Georgia, where his birth occurred in 1852, and was the younger of two children born to Matthew and Catherine (Hughes) Hughes, the parents natives of North Carolina and Georgia, respectively. The father was a successful tiller of the soil, and this occupation followed all his life. F. P. Hughes was reared on the farm, attending the common schools until the age of eighteen, when he engaged in farming. In 1877 he came to Arkansas, settled in Howard County, where he remained one year, and then came into Pike County, where he homesteaded a farm of 160 acres, five miles northeast of town. On this place he has cleared forty acres, and has erected good buildings, outhouses, etc. He has a good orchard and a choice selection of fruit. Mr. Hughes was married, in 1873, to Miss Louisa Willie, a native of Georgia. To the union of Mr. and Mrs. Hughes were born five children, all living: Curtis Floyd, Ira Rispah, Lula Delana, Jesse Pierce and Eula Octavia. Mr. Hughes is a self-made man, and his education is the result principally of observation and private study. He takes an active interest in all matters of public improvement, especially in the way of schools and churches, and is also active in politics, voting with the Democratic party. At the time of our subject’s settlement on his present fine farm, all was a wilderness; his nearest neighbor was a mile and a half away, and the country was far from being in the prosperous condition it is today. Now the whole vicinity is thickly settled, a school near home has an attendance of forty pupils, and a cotton-gin one mile away ground 175 bales of cotton. They have three churches which have been erected since 1879, and all within three miles of Mr. Hughes. The community is composed of thrifty and industrious citizens, and Mr. Hughes is among the foremost.