You Can Find Anything You Want at the Grant County Museum in Sheridan.

Dolls from the 19th and 20th century are collected in
this exhibit that includes a turn-of-the-century writing desk.

There are museums that focus on a single subject, and there are museums that focus on a single time period.  The Grant County Museum, located on the southwest side of Sheridan, focuses on an entire county and everything that's ever happened within it -- everything from

The courthouse exhibit includes the original clock from the
tower, as well as a desk and shelves from the
building, photographs and election paraphernalia.

prehistory to modern times, the Civil War to Operation Desert Shield, politics to domestic life and everything in-between.

The ten acre compound features one gallery after another, organized in a massive building that's seen several expansions; and within a village created from original buildings organized to give children and adults a like a working knowledge of everything Grant County.

The old general store shown here was once home
 to the Grant County Museum.

The Grant County Museum was originally located in an old general store near the heart of Sheridan. Grants and donated land allowed a new facility to be built, and as the collection has grown, so has the museum. The main building consists of several galleries that include everything from

A full-sized replica of a mule is decked with 19th century tack.

clothing from the early 19th century, to displays covering commercial traffic along the Saline River.  Like classic cars? A fine selection of automobiles dating back to the 1920s crowd one large room, with delivery trucks, fast cars and even

Vehicles from several decades are on display in a large room
that also displays signs and bottles from local eateries
and gas stations.

a fire engine. Enjoy taxidermy? There’s an entire hall that showcases critters from the area’s forests, rivers and fields. Dig military history? An entire series of galleries covers local participation from the Civil War to the Persian Gulf.

An entire exhibit is dedicated to ARKLA, the Arkansas-Louisiana Gas Company, which serviced most of the state. Within, you’ll see an original ARKLA truck, various gas-powered appliances over the ages and the desk of Witt Stephens.

A selection of different appliances powered by natural gas
on display in the ARKLA gas exhibit.

Flags overhead in the Jenkins Ferry room are from different
regiments of the Confederate Army.

A downtown Sheridan barber shop is partially preserved within the largest gallery. The entire mirrored wall from one side of the old building is accompanied by an array of different barber and dental chairs. Nearby, a “scoundrel’s gallery” documenting different infamous crimes that took place in

Items brought back from the second World War are on display
 in this hall.

Grant County, offers stories within wood and glass cases.

The northwest wing of the facility hosts a collection of Civil War memorabilia, including items showing what life was like back during the conflict. A special section commemorates the Battle of Jenkins

Vehicles and memorabilia from the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Ferry, the last significant battle of the Red River Campaign. Other galleries nearby contain items donated by Grant County servicemen and women who served in World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam conflict, Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

These vehicles are part of the collection donated to the
museum by Richard G. Harrison.

Out back, you’ll find a large hangar packed with military vehicles. This is the Richard G. Harrison Military Vehicle Collection, which may be the largest privately-owned collection of U.S. military vehicles on display anywhere. Harrison, a Little Rock native, drove a Jeep and delivered secret

documents while serving during World War II in Hawaii. He donated the collection in 2002-2003. The selections include Big Bertha, a tank retriever and artillery vehicle; a Navy communications bunker; a Jeep similar to the one that Harrison drove while in Hawaii; and a monolithic camera that enlarged photos taken by planes to use for troop maneuvers and battle plans.

The Hilltown Café, once the Donaldson Café, still contains a
kitchen and different advertisements for cola and sweets.

There’s also the Heritage Square, a collection of buildings from the 19th and 20th centuries that include a blacksmithy and old schoolhouse; the 1935 Toler Chapel; a townhome built in 1904; the 1872 McCool House (a dogtrot cabin); the town’s former Masonic Chapel; the Edward F. McDonald House (which

Visitors can see what a post office looked like in the early part
of the 20th century inside the Edward F. McDonald House.

now houses displays for the town’s post office and doctor’s office) and the Hilltown Café, which was once Donaldson’s Café opened in 1927 on the outskirts of town. The collection also includes the old general store in which the original museum was once housed.

New to the property is a boardwalk that takes visitors out on an elevated walk through a forested section of the land.

This wide selection of preserved animals showcase the
fauna of Grant County.

Exploring the entire museum could take most of a day. School groups are encouraged. Visiting the museum is free for Grant County residents and a donation of $3 for non-residents ($1 for students).

Grant County Museum
521 Shackleford Road
Sheridan, AR 72150
(870) 942-4496
grantcountymuseumar.org
Open Tuesday-Saturday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.

The Starting Point.

Gibbs Grocery and Hunters Outpost south of Sheridan has been the place where hunters prepare for modern gun season in the area for 36 years.  

Used to be folks from all around central and south central Arkansas would migrate to one particular area the morning of the start of deer season.  They’d come by truck, some with four wheelers, all with their hunter orange and their guns and line up dutifully at checking stations like Gibbs Grocery and Hunters Outpost for the annual right of passage -- registering their first kill of the season.

Some would have bucks in the back of their trucks, other does.  A few lucky guys might have two in the back, ensuring the deep freezer at the house would be full for the winter.  Once they’d parked they’d come up and go find someone to register the kill for Game and Fish and then head off to get the deer processed or to butcher it at the house.

It’s a little different these days.  This, like the past couple of years, will be a lot quieter for the Gibbs and their kin at the little store south of Sheridan.  Sure, there will be all sorts of folks coming through at oh-dark-thirty in the morning to pick up a little breakfast and maybe some pimento cheese for later in the day, but since Arkansas Game and Fish put the registration of taken deer in the hands of the hunter with online and phone registration, there’s no need for the grand display of deer huntery that had happened before -- no trophy shots, no big brags, no photographs, just maybe an email here and there later on down the line from a victorious trip to leased lands along the river bottoms.

Yet still Gibbs Grocery remains and even thrives, with a fresh coat of bright green paint and the ever-buoyant attitudes of its staff.  It’s a place for family.

***

The Gibbs bought themselves the place along Highway 167 South some 36 years ago, when their son Alan was getting ready to go into the second grade (and when I was about, oh, two years old).  They offered a place to get some gas and a quick bite for down the road.

But the place grew.  Buddy and Barbara got the place up and going and added in the feed and seed, the various camouflage apparel, the scopes and guns and whatnot.  Taxidermied examples of what could be found in the woods out that way were brought in, mounted and displayed on any available surface.  Buddy’s son Alan grew up and started his own business, Gibbs Archery Manufacturing, which took off on its own and whose Easy Sling has become one of the top selling bow slings in the world.

Over the years, Gibbs has seen its biggest boom over two days in November -- the day before modern gun season and the day it starts.  It never fails -- the Friday before the start of the hunt folks come in from everywhere to provision up, grab a bite to eat and get their license for the year.

That particular Friday usually starts off around five in the morning.  There’ll likely be a few guys already parked out front, waiting for the store to open to get their cup of coffee and their license for the year.  Some will sit at one of the little yellow booths in the middle of the store and start swapping hunting lies and big buck stories.

They sit in an environment wallpapered with hunts of the past.  When this place was still a checkpoint for Game & Fish, Polaroids were taken of just about every trophy deer, turkey, boar or duck.  The Polaroids are beginning to fade, though.

We dropped in at Gibbs Grocery for a bite and noticed one thing right off the bat -- since last year, the Gibbs have painted the exterior bright green.  Inside it’s not much different, though amidst the stuffed deer heads, foxes and the eponymous deer butt on the wall there was spotted the head of a small T-Rex.  We hope that’s a joke.

Sat down for a quick bite to eat before the next stop, which my photographer was just snapping away.  The girls behind the counter looked at him for a moment, but paid him no mind.  Miss Barbara, on the other hand, made fit to comment about the action.

“You shoot a pretty camera,” she said.

“Yeah, I was wondering just what it was like around here on opening day,” he asked as he took another shot.

“Y’all aren’t from around here?” she asked.  When he replied in the nugatory, she started on about all the hunters that would stock up here.  “We get people that come back every year, only right the day before.  It’s like family.  They always come back.”

I noticed that in amidst all those Polaroids there were now emails taped to surfaces like the walls and the deli counter.  “The internet makes it different, I bet.”

“They don’t bring them deer here any more, no, they go do that on the computer or the phone now,” she told me.

We ordered a snack… my photographer choosing a Lemon Icebox pie.  I wanted a slice of pecan pie but moreover I wanted some of the pimento cheese from inside the deli case, and Miss Barbara obliged.

We went and picked drinks out of the cooler, but when I started to offer to pay she waived me off.  “You can pay whenever, as long as you pay before you go.  I’m a pretty good shot,” she said, indicating she could pop off a couple of rounds at a deadbeat customer from the counter to the edge of the parking lot.

Over that marvelous old-fashioned pimento cheese on wheat, we chatted back and forth.  She told me people still came out right before hunting season began, but it’s not like it used to be.  “There’d be people lined up all along the road back a ways, waiting their turn in.  It was like homecoming.”

“Do they still do that?”

“Not as much, but they still come.  Day before the season we’ll have our busiest day of the year.”

We shopped around a little while we were there and found all sorts of stuff beyond the convenience and grocery store up front.  There were all sorts of displays of things like Remington knives, duck calls, gun scopes and various guns.  There were also motorcycle leathers, bags and feathered leather vests.  You honestly could fuel up, dress up and dress out for a real adventure here.

When we were headed out the door, Miss Barbara hollered after us.  “Y’all comin’ back for hunting season?”

“I think we just might,” I hollered back.  And you know, I think I will.  I want to see what it’s like right before the big day.  I want to hear some of the tales that will be shared over hot coffee and sausage biscuits and pimento cheese, and see if whomever got that deer butt stuffed and mounted will be back to explain that particular sense of humor.

I know the place will be packed, no matter what year I return.

***

Technology and the internet has changed the nature of the hunt over the past decade.  Instead of the check points around the state a decade ago, today checking a kill is just a click or phone call away.

Steve “Wildman” Wilson of Arkansas Game and Fish says it’s been a logical progression.  “We started out changing the system by allowing certain deer camps to check their own deer, before we all had computers.  Now they can call in to Telecheck (the AGFC hotline phone number), they can go online or even now, there’s an app for that.”

Has the change affected the number of deer taken each year?  “It’s actually gone up.  We think the new system is easy, it’s what customers want.  Most people comply now, we make it so easy.  It’s also helping us gather statistics easier, year to year.

AFGC's Deer Checking App

“It makes it easier for us to set special seasons, too.  Used to be, with all those checkpoints out there, our guys would visit every one of them and get done with everything about the time it was time to hunt again.  Now we can make a better determination on when to schedule hunts.

“We have a special hunt this year in several zones, a doe-only hunt before the regular season.  We’ve determined from the numbers that there’s too high a doe ratio down in those areas.”

You can learn more about how to check your game by visiting the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission website at www.agfc.com.  There you’ll find the link for online checking and a link to the AGFC game checking app.

Arkansas Gold.

Everyone has an odd quirk, some strange food or combination of foods they really, really enjoy that might make others squeamish. Sometimes it’s just something that makes people scratch their heads and wonder. Other times it’s a true “you have GOT to be kidding me” sort of thing.

I feel this way about my husband’s “dream team” sandwich of salami, American cheese, and peanut butter. Makes no sense to me whatsoever. The food I eat that does the same for him? Pimento cheese. I seriously dig on a good Cheddar-based PC. Not the stuff you get at the grocery store that’s a mixture of pasteurized processed foodstuff with a few red flakes in it, but the sort of thing that a home cook has actually put together in their own kitchen with a big spoon and that little jar of red pimentos that’s about the size of a baby food canister from the store.

Hard to find a good pimento cheese sandwich around these parts. Forget about anything you might find in a truck stop; anyone brave enough to eat a truck stop pimento cheese sandwich had better have a lead-lined stomach. For a short while, St. Vincent’s had one in their cafeteria, but like so much of the good stuff that used to be served their it’s gone (they still do a mean Reuben, though).

A few weeks ago, I did stop in at the one place I knew that still did good pimento cheese -- a little place out in the boonies (re: south of Sheridan) that caters to the hunting and fishing crowd.

Gibb’s is a combination of sports stop, convenience store, restaurant, and bragging post. It’s the kind of place where old men go to brag about how many points were on that big deer they bagged 20 years ago, where people lie about fish. Where you expect the customers to have dirt under their nails from digging up their own worms in the backyard.

The walls are adorned with year after year after year of Polaroids of people and their scores -- the bucks draped across the back of a truck brought in for tagging and that notch on the license plate -- generally in the same pose with the guy or girl who bagged their buck holding its head up by the antlers for that snapshot in time. The pictures on some of the walls are so old, teenagers in the shots are now grandparents.

It’s a great little stopping-in joint, and about the last good place to pull in before you get down to Fordyce. There’s a counter there, and lunch specials and lunchmeat… and almost always on the bottom of the case there’s an oblong casserole dish full of pimento cheese. A sandwich costs a couple of bucks, but load me up with that and a container of chocolate milk from the case and I’m off to nostalgia-ville. The pimento cheese from Gibb’s is very much on the tangy side, and I wouldn’t be surprised if their mayo-based concoction is laced with the juice from those pimentos as well as the little red slivers of happiness.

You know, when I was a small child, I didn’t realize that pimentos were actually slivers of a variety of red chile pepper? I thought olives actually came that way, with little red centers. I think I was a teenager before I realized that olives came with hard pits. That’d be almost unheard of today… but you gotta remember, the culinary world as we know it didn’t really exist in Arkansas back in the 70s and 80s, not for most of us. It’s a recent phenomenon, this pedestrianization of haute cuisine. But I digress.

What got me on to thinking about pimento cheese was an encounter with a variety that I daresay rivals my mom’s mix, in a somewhat unlikely place. Pimento cheese, that stalwart of lunchboxes and fishing trip coolers, that most humble of Arkansas delights? Can be found at a Greek fare restaurant.

That’s right… you can find pimento cheese at Tazikis, the fashionable (and not too expensive) Greek place on Cantrell across from Pavilion in the Park. Right there, right along with hummus and taziki sauce, is pimento cheese. As a dip. Further down the page, it’s a sandwich, served on toasted buttermilk bread with Romaine lettuce. There’s even an offering of take-home pimento cheese by the pound or half-pound.

I discovered this one evening when I and a few of my traveling companions went to the eatery for a knosh. Lamb was ordered -- one chose the Sliced Chargrilled Leg of Lamb ($9.25) “Greek Feast,” while the other went for the Greek Surf and Turf ($12.25). I decided on my own light lamb dish and went for the Taziki’s Roasted Lamb in Fresh Pita ($7.95)… but I was also curious about the pimento cheese ($4.50) so I ordered it as an appetizer. Since it was paired with dips, I expected it to be more like a dip.

Instead, moments after I’d placed my order at the counter, a more-than-sufficient bowl of pimento cheese was brought out to us, along with a healthy pile of baked pita chips and Kalamata olives. My traveling companions shied away from such a pedestrian dish, but I nervously tried it. And I have to say, though my lamb gyro was awful good, I would have been as happy as a dead pig in the sunshine with just that order of pimento cheese. It put me in a happy place. The Cheddar cheese was slightly sharp, and the pimentos were plentiful, and even better there were chunks of green olive, too. It’s the closest anyone’s come to my mom’s recipe.

The rest of our Taziki’s fare was pretty darn good, too… the lamb still pink in the middle but charred beautifully and delightfully seasoned. The shrimp was just cooked past the point of not being done at all, perfect mouthfeel and salty in its seasoning. The tomato-cucumber salad is reminiscent of Star of India’s Kachumber Salad but with Parmesan cheese instead of garam masala and other spices, vinegary and tinged with slivers of red onion. Dinners come with a Greek salad and a choice of roasted potatoes or Basmati rice… gyros with potato chips and a choice of the tomato-cucumber salad, the potatoes or rice, a pasta salad or fresh fruit.

I know it sounds crazy to talk about a single, simple dish from a restaurant so much, especially when it’s something so… humble. But it really impressed me, and even if I hadn’t liked anything else there I’d be going back for more of a childhood favorite.

You’ll find Taziki’s Greek Fare at 8200 Cantrell Road in Little Rock. I understand they’re a chain but that all the other locations are in Alabama, how about that. They have a website and are open from 11 a.m. for lunch every day, and dinner every day except Sunday. (501) 227-8291.

And in case you’re curious, you can find Gibb’s Grocery and Hunters Outpost at 7781 Highway 167 South, about six miles south of Sheridan. It could be the busiest place in the world on the opening day of modern gun deer season in Arkansas, but that’s another story. You can also call if you like -- (870) 942-5284.