Title: Julian Archer and the Pratt Place Inn - Part 1 of 3

Julian Archer is the only living child of Evangeline Pratt Waterman Archer. He grew up on Markham Hill in the house built in 1929 by his parents Evangeline and Julian Waterman, now on the National Register of Historic Places. He rode horses, hunted arrow heads, and played in the woods and big meadow with his friends.

Evangeline married Laird Archer in 1947, four years after her husband Julian died. Laird adopted Evangeline's son Julian. From 1947-1952, between the ages of 9 and 13, Julian lived in Greece with his parents. Julian was enrolled in schools created to serve the children of English speaking parents. In 1947 the school was called The British Army School and the children were bussed there in British Army trucks driven by British soldiers.  Later it became the Anglo-American School.

The family returned to Fayetteville in 1952 when Laird Archer retired from his position as Foreign Director of Near East Foundation. Julian attended Fayetteville Junior High (in the old Fayetteville High on School Street) and the next year went to Fayetteville High. For his junior and senior years he attended Principia Upper School in St. Louis and then returned to Fayetteville in 1956 to enroll at the University of Arkansas.

The following paragraphs are extracted from an article in the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette dated June 29, 2014, entitled ‘History and hospitality - Julian Pratt Waterman Archer’, and written by April Robertson.

"As 9-year-old Julian Archer stared longingly out the school window, he could have been any bored fourth-grader, but the truth was that he wasn’t bored at all. He fell in love with history while admiring the Acropolis from his classroom in Athens. Sometimes after school, he’d ride his bicycle along the original marathon route with his friends, which began a lifelong habit of learning as much as he could about a place before going out and experiencing it firsthand.

“He was extremely serious [about history], more so than most,” says Bill Sherman, who knew Archer from their time growing up in Fayetteville. “He was intellectually curious … an exceptionally interesting person, a passionate individual.”

Later in life, Archer extended his passion for history by guiding others through historic France and Western Europe, and by preserving an important piece of Fayetteville history, the Pratt Place Inn and Barn.

Aside from his few years in Greece, Archer, 75, was brought up in the Ozarks. The son of the University of Arkansas School of Law founder Julian Waterman, he attended Fayetteville schools and studied government at the University of Arkansas. He participated in the ROTC program throughout college, and after graduation he joined the Army to find a career.

Archer completed basic training in May 1960, and spent the seven months waiting for his assignment to begin by attending the University of Colorado at Boulder, where the skiing was good and prerequisites nonexistent for the master’s in history program.

Archer entered the military as a second lieutenant just as John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as president in January 1961, and he took on his assignment with equal gravity. After infantry school at Fort Benning, Ga., he attended Army intelligence school at Fort Holabird in Baltimore and was placed in the 66th Intelligence Corps Group in Stuttgart, Germany. It put him in the very exciting business of catching spies through the less exciting task of cross-referencing information. For a year and a half, he searched through 5 million names on library like reference cards and waded through heaps of data-filled papers to sort out what didn’t match up.

“I saw him at Fort Benning, when I was an infantry officer,” Sherman says. “He spent time training there … and it was a perfect fit for him.”

Archer says he and his comrades caught more than a thousand spies in one year, and the constant reminders that they were responsible for catching as many threats as possible, without breathing a word of it outside the intelligence building, made for a stressful environment.

“The tension level was so high in this unit that five [of the 1,500] people committed suicide,” Archer says. “It was paramount. It’s not combat, no, but it’s the pressure to deliver. Every piece of paper you touch is confidential, secret, top secret.”

To alleviate that stress, Archer spent his free time traveling, mountain climbing, skiing and enjoying the officers club, where he was introduced to a beautiful woman who needed a dance partner. During their courtship, he and Jane made holiday dates for skiing and travel, and once school and military assignments were over, they got married.

The newlyweds arrived stateside in January 1963, and Archer completed his master’s degree in history at the University of Colorado in Boulder that summer. After one semester at University of Arkansas School of Law, Jane pointed out that his heart wasn’t in it and persuaded him to pursue his genuine interest — history. Two years of doctoral coursework at the University of Wisconsin affirmed for Archer that he was doing something worthwhile, and he was delighted to return to Europe for the final year of his education, where he researched French history."

Photo: Julian and Jane Archer with their three children Jane, Laird, and Elisabeth (L to R)

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