Photo by J. H. Field, Fayetteville. Lighton Family Papers

This digital exhibit was supported by grants from the Happy Hollow Foundation to Special Collections in 2000-2001 to undertake a pilot project in digitization of archival materials. The Foundation was established by Betty Lighton of Fayetteville, who lived with her parents and siblings on the Happy Hollow Farm on the south side of Mount Sequoyah. William Rheem Lighton came to Fayetteville in 1908 with his wife Laura and three children, Dorothy, Louis, and Suzanne. Marjorie, who was called Betty, was born two years later.

They bought a hundred sixty acres of land east of town and embarked on the project that William Rheem Lighton described in articles and pamphlets. One such was "The Story of an Arkansas Farm," in The Saturday Evening Post in 1910. It enjoyed a wide circulation at a time when "back-to-the land" and scientific farming ideas were in vogue. The article was reprinted as a promotional piece by the Frisco Railroad. He expanded this work in a book, Happy Hollow Farm, which describes his successes and his tribulations.

Later he wrote a successful series of magazine stories about "Billy Fortune" and went to Hollywood to adapt some of them for the movies. Will Rogers's first movie was based on a Billy Fortune story. Louis "Bud" Lighton went with his father to Hollywood, and achieved considerable success as a screen-writer, though the senior Lighton did not long survive the move, and after his death in California in 1923 Laura Lighton and her daughters made their home in Fayetteville.

Suzanne graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1925 and read law with Judge Lee Seamster. After she passed the Arkansas Bar, she practiced law in Fayetteville, specializing in juvenile cases in the Washington County court system.

Photo by Glenn Studio, Fayetteville, Lighton Family Papers

Papers pertaining to the Lighton family were donated to Special Collections by Betty Lighton in December 1987. The finding aid is online.