Albert Pike

Albert Pike

Arkansas’s Confederate poetic Masonic Lawyer and Commander at Pea Ridge

"What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal." - Albert Pike

Carved at the home of Albert Pike's statue at Third and D Streets in Northwest Washington are the words, "philosopher, jurist, public speaker, writer, poet, student, soldier." Born in Massachusetts, Pike was six feet tall and weighed 300 pounds, an imposing image even without his waist length hair. Although rumored to have been instrumental in the early organization of the KKK, he had a great influence on the early courts of Arkansas and as an influential member of the free masons. Albert Pike was a lawyer who played a major role in the development of the early courts of Arkansas and During the Civil War, he commanded the Confederacy’s Indian Territory.

Albert Pike was born December 29, 1809, child of Ben and Sarah Pike, and spent his childhood in Byfield and Newburyport, Massachusetts. He attended school at Newburyport and Framingham until he was 15. In August 1825, at the age of 16 he was accepted at Harvard University, because of a dispute over tuition fees he did not attend . He would receive an Honorary Master of Arts degree from Harvard in 1859, in recognition of his prose as a poet. In 1831, Pike left Massachusetts to journey west, joining a hunting expedition to New Mexico. During the trip he lost his horse and walked the remaining 500 miles to New Mexico. His travels ultimately led him to Fort Smith Arkansas. He taught school and went to work for the newspaper the Arkansas Advocate. He used a portion of the dowry he received when he married Mary Ann Hamilton 10 October 1834 to buy the newspaper. Under P...

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...rove" his membership within the Klan. While others argue that not only was he "the chief judicial officer" of the Klan, he was also the Arkansas leader of the Klan. Marginal evidence exists that Pike was a leader or founder of the Klan. Nevertheless there is enough fringe evidence to continue to fuel the debate.

In conclusion, even though he had expressed his desire to be cremated, he was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington following his death On April 2, 1981 in Washington, D.C. at the age of 81. He was exhumed in 1944 and his remains were moved to the headquarters of the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish rite in Washington D.C. They remain there to this day. The first highway between Hot Springs, Arkansas and Colorado Springs, Colorado, was named the Albert Pike Highway. The Arts Center Community Gallery in Little Rock is in his former Little Rock Home.