By John Balch
News-Leader staff
NASHVILLE – Plans are moving ahead for a film adaptation to document a unique part of local Arkansas frontier history, which after almost two centuries lives on along the banks of the Muddy Fork Creek.
The proposed documentary project will adapt the book The Seed of Sally Good’n: A Black Family of Arkansas, 1833-1953, written by the late Dr. Ruth Polk Patterson and published in 1985. The book chronicles the life and times of the Polk family and the origins of the author’s grandfather, John Spencer Polk, a former slave and son of an African-Indian slave named Sally and her white owner, Taylor Polk, noted as a descendant of “one of America’s first families and one of the earliest settlers in the Arkansas Territory.”
The project has been granted documentary film rights to Patterson’s niece, Charlotte Carr of Scarsdale, N.Y., and local author and former history teacher, Bill Farris of Nashville. Carr and Farris will be co-producers and David Weekley of the University of Arkansas-Little Rock has signed on as director. Weekley has international projects to his credit and more than 20 years of experience “in almost every phase of video production,” according to UALR’s website.
