Where Hillcrest History Took Root On Spruce

By: Jill Curran

In June 2025, the Hillcrest Garden Club sponsored the First Annual Hillcrest Garden Contest, naming 12 winners, including 1100 N Spruce St as winner of the “Best Large Garden” prize. While Barbara Miles is responsible for the home’s current award-winning garden, this was not the house’s first encounter with the Hillcrest Garden Club. In fact, 1100 N Spruce St is the founding site of the Hillcrest Garden Club itself. Then the home of Mr. and Mrs. Allen Rice, 1100 N Spruce St hosted the inaugural meeting of the Hillcrest Garden Club on May 7th, 1940. It became the 20th garden club of greater Little Rock, and, fittingly, Mrs. Rice was elected its first historian. Excited by this piece of history we uncovered, we have taken a deeper dive into the connections the residents of 1100 N Spruce St have had to the Hillcrest community over the years.

A decade before the Hillcrest Garden Club was founded, Mr. J. B. Webster of 1100 N Spruce St presided over the 1927 meeting to discuss the City of Little Rock acquiring the nearby ravine as Little Rock’s newest park. Mr. Webster later represented the neighborhood at the City Council meeting that established Allsopp Park through an unanimous vote. 

Three years later, a young resident of 1100 N Spruce St gained recognition for a much different feat. The Arkansas Gazette presented a challenging math problem in their Tuesday addition, crediting Mr. Ray Robinson, a local car salesman, for solving it shortly before midnight, admitting that “he had devoted more time to the puzzle during office hours than he had to demonstrating automobiles.” Burton Webster Jr., then a student at Little Rock High School (now Central) who lived at 1100 N Spruce St, was unimpressed, presenting an alternative solution and exclaiming, “Pshaw, I solved that before breakfast Tuesday.”

A year before hosting the formative meeting of the Hillcrest Garden Club in her living room, the enterprising Mrs. Rice took out a Gazette ad selling “Scotties of Distinction,” referring to Scottish Terriers which were a very popular dog breed of the time. With an asking price of $35 and $50, they would sell for $809 and $1,150 per dog in today’s currency. Just three months after she hosted the founding meeting of the Hillcrest Garden Club, Mrs. Rice judged a contest of a different nature: choosing “Arkansas’s Most Typical Family” for the Gazette.

Five months after the US entered World War II, 1100 N Spruce St, like many homes at the time, offered a bedroom for rent. And, in 1963, its resident Mrs. Clifford Gilstrap, who was said to find “pleasure in fancy cooking,” shared her recipe for Broken Glass Cake with the readers of the Arkansas Democrat. Described as “brightly colored cubes of fruit-flavored gelatin sparkling in a whipped cream mixture,” Mrs. Gilstrap explains that this “extra pretty dessert” is “a simple thing that can’t fail.” In addition to her Broken Glass Cake, Mrs. Gilstrap also shared her recipe for Easy Barbecue Chicken, Raw Peanut Candy, and Pecan Pie. All of her recipes can be found in the newsclipping below. 

From math whizzes to beautiful gardens, 1100 N Spruce St has a long history in the Hillcrest community. If you would like to research stories about your Hillcrest home, you can search through the Arkansas Gazette and other Arkansas newspapers online through the library's website or visit the Butler Center at 401 President Clinton Ave for hands-on help. Please share what you find with the Hillcrest Residents Association on social media. Here’s to many more years of Hillcrest history and beautiful Hillcrest gardens!