The Story

The Bloodworth House was originally built in the early 1900s and was purchased in 1934 by Charles Thomas 'C.T.' Bloodworth and his wife, Effie Belford Bloodworth. The Bloodworth family relocated from Corning, Arkansas to Poplar Bluff that year, fleeing death threats from the Ku Klux Klan due to Charles Bloodworth's courageous stands against corruption as a newspaper editor and Arkansas state representative.

Charles T. Bloodworth, standing 6'4" tall, was a self-educated lawyer who never finished sixth grade but became a voracious reader and eventually earned a law degree by clerking under an Arkansas judge. Despite multiple death threats and even being shot point-blank in the chest by a Klan-affiliated assailant (he miraculously survived), Bloodworth refused to back down from his principles.

The house became home to the Bloodworth family, including their four sons—Haskell, Charles, Ralph, and Howard—who all went on to put themselves through law school before serving in World War II. Uncle Howard served with Patton in Africa, Ralph became a Japanese war crimes prosecutor, and Charles served as a judge advocate at Nuremberg, bringing home one of only three handwritten transcripts from the Nuremberg trials.

In 1992, Linda Bloodworth Thomason (granddaughter of C.T. Bloodworth and Emmy-winning creator of 'Designing Women') commissioned a major renovation under Memphis designer William R. Eubanks. Most remarkably, she hired Crowther of Syon Lodge, the Queen's 400-year-old architectural firm that had renovated Windsor Castle, to build a massive English library and attach it to the original house.

The library, constructed from hand-carved Scottish Pine panels and reclaimed Belgian White Oak floors, was built in England, deconstructed, shipped across the Atlantic to New Orleans, transported up the Mississippi River on barges, and finally reassembled in Poplar Bluff by English craftsmen over six months. It is now recognized as the largest personal library in the southeastern United States and houses the Bloodworth family's extensive collection of law books.

Today, the Bloodworth House serves as a cultural, civic, and educational hub for the community, hosting weddings, celebrations, fundraising concerts, and charitable events through The Claudia Foundation (founded by Linda Bloodworth Thomason in memory of her mother).

Source: The Bloodworth House official website