Maxfield House

This historic home in one of Arkansas' oldest settlements has witnessed nearly two centuries of life and death in the Arkansas hill country. Batesville was founded in 1821.

The Maxfield name runs deep through Batesville, Arkansas -- the oldest existing city in the state, established by treaty with the Osage Indians in 1808. The Maxfield family arrived in the early 1800s as Batesville pioneers, and their legacy is stamped across the town's landscape. The most historically significant structure connected to the family is the Garrott House at 561 East Main Street, built in 1842 by master carpenter and cabinetmaker George Case for his wife's sister Eliza Ridgeway Williams and her husband Robert, who had come from Ohio. The story-and-a-half Georgian home features an inner structure of squared logs mortised and pegged together, with diagonal bracing at the corners -- a construction technique that has kept the building standing for nearly two centuries as Batesville's oldest surviving residential structure. After Robert Williams's death and Eliza's departure for California during the gold rush around 1849, George Case reclaimed the property. Following the Civil War, his daughter Mary Catherine and her husband William Maxfield -- a merchant and son of Batesville pioneers Uriah and Leah Maxfield -- moved in and raised four daughters: Eula, Nettie, Ernestine, and Kate, along with William's niece May Wilson.

In the 1880s, the Maxfields modernized the house, replacing the detached side-yard kitchen with a stone kitchen and flanking porches at the rear. They added a front gable at the center of the roof to accommodate a new bedroom upstairs, along with Victorian embellishments including faux marble fireplaces, ornate window cornices, and eight-foot doors that remain in the house today. William Maxfield died in 1896, and his wife survived until 1940. In 1944, their daughter Eula and her husband, Reverend Ernest Perry Jackson Garrott, returned to Batesville when Garrott became pastor of the First Baptist Church, and the house served as the church parsonage until 1962. The property was later purchased by Terrell and Diane Tebbetts in 1990, who undertook a careful restoration with architect Charles Witsell. The Garrott House became the first Batesville structure listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.

Separately, Theodore Maxfield opened the Maxfield Store on Main Street in 1875, stocking it with a wide variety of goods. The store served as one of Batesville's important commercial establishments for decades. The building later became Back in Time Antiques, and it is here that the most persistent ghost story associated with the Maxfield name unfolds. A little girl from a bygone era is said to roam the building, her spirit thought to be connected to the Maxfield family who operated the store for generations. Staff and visitors to the antique shop have reported unmistakable signs of her presence among the old merchandise.

At the residential Maxfield House, the paranormal activity takes a different character. A woman in a white nightgown has been seen appearing on the staircase landing at midnight, where she pauses before slowly ascending to the second floor and vanishing at the top of the stairs. The central stairway of the 1842 house -- with its original mortise-and-peg construction -- provides a fitting stage for a spirit seemingly caught in a nightly routine from another century. Residents have reported the sound of a child crying in the empty upstairs rooms, echoing through the two chambers that flank the upper floor. On the wraparound front porch, rocking chairs have been observed moving on their own, creaking back and forth as if occupied by an invisible sitter enjoying the view of Main Street. Whether the crying child upstairs is connected to the little girl reported at the former Maxfield Store, or whether they represent separate spirits attached to different Maxfield properties, remains an open question.

Batesville's long history -- two centuries of settlement in the foothills of the Ozarks -- has generated a rich tradition of ghost stories throughout the town, from the vanishing hitchhiker along its roads to the old usher still making his rounds at the Melba Theater. But the Maxfield haunting stands apart because of the family's deep roots in the community and the multiple properties that bear their name. The 1842 house survived the devastating 1920 fire that destroyed much of downtown Batesville, and its hand-hewn log bones have absorbed nearly two hundred years of the family's joys and sorrows. The Maxfield Store is now gone, replaced by Maxfield Park, but the memories -- and perhaps the spirits -- remain.