Carry A. Nation was a militant voice in the “wilderness of sin” at the turn of the century. Her three hatchets, which she named “Faith, Hope and Charity,” cut deeply into the liquor industry. Not that the liquor she destroyed in her attacks on bars and saloons amounted to a great deal, but her influence in fostering nation-wide prohibition was far reaching. She spent considerable time in jail and paid numerous fines, but this did not lesson her enthusiasm for the cause to which she devoted her life. Carry hated liquor, tobacco, rouge, lip-stick, and immorality in all its phases. She operated under the unwritten law which, she thought, superseded man-made legislation. Even some of the churches did not condone her radical ways and closed their doors to her. But she organized her own.

Carry married twice; first to a young fellow in Cass County, Missouri, who called himself “doctor.” He was addicted to drink and Carry could not reform him so she left him and returned to the home of her parents. He died shortly after their baby was born. Her second marriage was to David Nation, a lawyer, newspaper man, and later, a Campbellite preacher. This marriage fared better than the first one but it was not a happy affair. Carry cut the swath for the family and David had to string along as best he could.

Carry Nation’s militant crusades against the liquor traffic began at Kiowa, Kansas about 1900. After “cleaning up” the town to her satisfaction she turned her face toward Wichita. She met with considerable opposition in the big town and her raids landed her in jail, but friends paid her out. At Topeka she used the hatchet for the first time in her raids.

After a few years of raiding and smashing she went into chautauqua to lecture on temperance. She made a speaking tour in Europe in 1908 and landed in jail in Scotland where she had to serve the full sentence. (The Scotch did not like to see their whiskey spilled). In 1909, at the age of sixty-three, she bought a little farm near Alpena in Boone County, Arkansas where she spent a part of her time during the year that followed. Then she selected Eureka Springs as her retirement home and purchased a two-story frame house on Steele Street which she named Hatchet Hall. She decided to start a college at Eureka Springs for the teaching of temperance. She called it the Carry A. Nation College and erected a frame building near her home for class rooms. But the college did not last long for in 1911, while making a temperance speech from a buggy in the street in front of the Basin Circle, she had a stroke, and died a few days later. Her body was taken to her girlhood home at Belton, Missouri for burial.