February 9

1862 -- Four Fayetteville men, Confederate soldiers killed in Missouri at the Battle of Wilson Creek, were buried at Mount Comfort Cemetery on this day. The four were Captain S.R. Bell, Sergeant Williman Brown and Privates Samuel McCurdy and Henry Fulbright. Members of the Masonic Lodge, of which Bell was also a member, and a large number of residents escorted the soldiers’ remains to the cemetery where they were buried with honors. “The exercises were solemn and imposing; and the large concourse of citizens assembled showed the esteem in which the deceased patriots had been held by their fellow-citizens of Washington county,” wrote The War Bulletin.
2000 -- Sarah Caldwell, the “first lady of American opera,” staged her last opera, Abstract Opera No. 1, at the University of Arkansas on this day, while she was serving as a distinguished professor. Caldwell, who considered Fayetteville her home, founded the Opera Company of Boston and was its artistic director at the time of her death in 2006. She made history in 1976 by directing La Traviata at the Metropolitan Theater in 1976.