Last summer, a friend from Blytheville remarked that even before damage from the tornado of March 31, 2023, a person could exit I-430 and drive to downtown Little Rock along Cantrell Road and take in our billboards, our smoke shops, our gas stations, and our parking lots without ever suspecting that on either side of Cantrell lie beautiful suburban neighborhoods with some of the highest real estate values in the state.
No passing stranger would guess how many aesthetically inclined people, artists and patrons of the arts live along that stretch of road and travel it every day, enduring the visual clutter that mars its extraordinary natural beauty.
The complaint is not new. On Jan. 19, 1946, on behalf of the Little Rock Garden Club, Marcella Penzel (president) and Bess Townsend (secretary) sent a letter to Dan Travis Sprick, mayor of Little Rock.
"Members of the Garden Club have watched with dismay the encroachment of commerce upon natural beauty along Cantrell Road, Highway 10," they wrote. "We have enjoyed the beautiful early green of the spring and watched it turn to the riotous colors of the fall and we had felt that this was one road leading out of Little Rock that had not been despoiled."
Members of the Garden Club had noted that "an increasing number of billboards" were being placed "in conspicuous spots along the road" and unanimously adopted a resolution to urge the City Council to use all of its power to stop the trend.
While she objected to billboards as a by-product of (or inducement to) commerce, Marcella Penzel surely would not have objected to commerce in any broad sense, having been its great beneficiary.
Born in 1883, Marcella was the third daughter of Rosa A. Eisenmayer and Charles Ferdinand Penzel, a wholesale grocer, banker, and civic leader who prospered, to put it lightly, from his investments in Little Rock and elsewhere. Charles Penzel was, according to Dan Durning's entry in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, one of the 28 emigrants from the Bohemian city of Asch (now part of the Czech Republic) who settled in Pulaski County between 1848 and 1857.
Walking around Mount Holly Cemetery and Oakland Jewish Cemetery, I'm always struck by how many of Little Rock's prominent citizens were born in Bohemia or elsewhere in central Europe in the early or middle 19th century.
When I read about immigrant families like the Penzels in Little Rock newspapers, it's evident that their highbrow interests contributed to a culture completely at odds with our state's reputation for ignorance, sloth, and indifference. They were aesthetically inclined people, after all. (As were a good many members of Little Rock's Black establishment.)
Hedwig, Hildegarde, and Marcella Penzel all attended the Ogontz School for Young Ladies in Philadelphia. (Amelia Earhart is a famous alumna.) Held in a five-story mansion on financier Jay Cooke's Ogontz Estate, the school offered a "finishing" education to prepare young women for capital-S Society; its 1888 catalog notes that "the study of history, literature, languages, and art will be conducted with especial reference to foreign travel."
After taking, according to the Democrat, "a regular school course and a special school course for the past three years," Marcella graduated on June 3, 1902, and returned to Little Rock at age 19. Apart from travels and a brief period of boarding out in 1915, Marcella lived at the Penzel house at 518 E. Seventh St. in Little Rock until 1941, when architect Max Mayer built twin houses on North Palm Street in the Heights for Marcella and her sister Hildegarde, now Mrs. Moorhead Wright.
City directories indicate that the Penzel house downtown was divided into apartments. It survived until the mid-1980s, when it was demolished for a nondescript apartment complex. Only a curbstone marked PENZEL survives.
The Penzel mausoleum in Mount Holly, however, remains quite an impressive monument. And it's in Sybil Crawford's research collection for her 1993 book about Mount Holly that something of Marcella's personality survives.
William Moore (Billy Moore) Clark and Josephine (Deanie) Heiskell Harrison interviewed Marcella in 1973 or 1974. (The transcript is undated but Marcella mentions being 90 years old.) The ostensible subject was her longtime service on the board of the Mount Holly Cemetery Association, but thanks to Marcella's candor and humor, much more comes through.
Mount Holly Cemetery was dedicated in 1843, but by 1877 was in such bad shape that a commission formed to clean it up. The commission's efforts, according to the Mount Holly Cemetery Association's website, were short-lived, and by 1914 the place was "once again nearly derelict."
In the interview, Moore asks, "What was the condition of the cemetery that made it advisable for you ladies to establish this Mount Holly Association?"
"The men on the board were all busy businessmen," Marcella explains, "and they could not go out there and superintend it, and old Mr. McClaughlin, who was the sexton for 40 years--before we got this drunken Horace--was old and not very particular, so the thing was in bad condition, terrible condition. And so we organized the ladies' board and we then took over."
That was 1915. Hildegarde drafted Marcella onto the board. "She thought it would be good for me," Marcella explains, adding later, "I was not the kind that was ever active in anything, but [Hildegarde] was always after me. And she just pushed and tugged with me all her life, because I never wanted to do anything. I didn't do anything when I got there. I never have done anything yet on that board except second a motion."
Clark asks, "Miss Marcella, were you on there when all the stir arose when Mr. Rightsell tried to claim Eloise Murphy's lot?" He adds, "That was the funniest thing I've ever been through. I was the lawyer for Mount Holly."
Marcella replies, "Oh, Eloise called Miss Emily [Emily Boyle Bourne, 1877-1961, another longtime board member] one day and said "That G**d*** old man Rightsell tried to claim my ground out there. You tell him [she called Horace, too, the sexton, to pass the word] that that I will be there at 7 o'clock in the morning with my shotgun."
This was about 1955. Eloise Murphy triumphed, not by shotgun, but by having a deed and having paid taxes on the lot for years.
"There never was a meeting of the Mount Holly Cemetery board that somebody didn't get mad," Marcella reminisces, but, "Oh, it really was a funny board. And I miss those meetings so."
While there were squabbles over property within the cemetery itself, there were also great kindnesses. "Somebody was always borrowing our crypt," Marcella says about the years before the construction of the large mausoleum that Charles Thompson designed. "They used the crypt in ours for I don't know how many people. Put in there while they were building the public one."
"A lot of people didn't like Miss Teddie," Marcella says of a local matron whose young son died, but after the remaining Penzels let her borrow space in their crypt, she took flowers to Charles Penzel's grave on his birthday every year. "I thought that was right remarkable for her always to remember."