Carolyn Holmes Featherston Reaves (1920-2015) was an amateur photographer primarily active in Cleveland County, Arkansas. She was born August 10, 1920, to George Henry Holmes and Alleen Niemeyer Holmes in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. She graduated from Rison High School in 1938, and went on to attend Henderson State Teachers College before marrying Marshall Featherston in 1940. The couple had four children: John, Sam, Cindy, and Fran. Marshall Featherston passed away in 1959, and several years later, Carolyn Featherston moved with her three younger children back to Cleveland County, Arkansas, where she lived for the next 30 years. In 1967, she remarried, to Robert Gibbs Reaves.

In 1968, Carolyn Reaves took a Press Photography class at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville; she subsequently established a darkroom in her home and took up a decades-long commitment to photographing her community, family, and friends. Daughter Fran Featherston notes in a biographical sketch of her mother (found in Box 21, Folder 11) that “Carolyn’s favorite subjects were family and friends. She didn’t let people know that she was about to take their pictures, preferring more candid shots. Some relatives asked her to refrain from taking their photographs, but she rarely succumbed to their objections. Carolyn took a few photographs that she sold to a short-lived newspaper called the Pine Bluff News, but mostly she took the photographs for her own enjoyment. Once, neighbors wanted to hire her to take pictures of their deceased relative in the coffin at the funeral parlor. They explained that they did not have any recent pictures of her. Carolyn took the job.”

Reaves was an active member of the Mt. Carmel Church in Rison, and author of a column in the Cleveland County Herald. Reaves passed away June 18, 2015.