OK, OK — so it wasn’t as dark as the image chosen for this article. But it was still quite dark.

Arkadelphia experienced 2 minutes and 1 second of darkness in the daytime Monday, April 8, 2024, as the Great American Eclipse made its way across North America.

The rare event drew an unknown number of spectators from several states. Despite the threat of cloudy conditions over South Arkansas, the viewing experience for the eclipse in Arkadelphia turned out to be perfect.

An estimated 300-400 people took in the eclipse at Henderson State University’s Carpenter Haygood Stadium.

For former Arkadelphia residents and those who were unable to step outside to watch the eclipse, arkadelphian.com recorded a panoramic view of the stadium during the eclipse. Viewers tuned in from Green Bay (Wisconsin), Twin Cities (Minnesota), Kansas City, Baton Rouge (Louisiana), Georgia and Northwest Arkansas to watch as the field turned dark.

In the minutes before total darkness, the sky dimmed as though the sun — despite it being directly overhead — were setting for the evening. Shadows grew soft, and what light was left outside gave a yellowish tint. For someone viewing the sun through a pair of eclipse glasses, our solar system’s star appeared as a mere crescent, much like that of the moon during certain parts of any given month.

As the moon completely blocked the sun, darkness blanketed the area. The crowd at Carpenter Haygood gave a collective roar of elation. One person yelled, jokingly, “Who turned out the lights?!”

For two minutes in Arkadelphia, the sun appeared only as a halo around the moon’s silhouette. At least one planet in the solar system was visible to the naked eye. The temperature outside dropped a few degrees in the minutes before and after the eclipse.

A newspaper account of the June 1918 eclipse over Arkadelphia, published then by the Arkansas Gazette, summed up the event rather well for a time before cell phones and social media: “The total eclipse of the sun at this place was very interesting,” the writer noted, “despite the intermittent cloudiness. … The effects were startling. Darkness came on very suddenly and lights flashed on over the city. Automobilists switched on their headlights. Lightning bugs quickly roused from the grass and scattered abroad. An old hen, with her little chickens, beat a quick retreat for the coop and she was all fussed up about being caught away from home by the darkness. Calf bleatings were answered by the low of the cow. To all appearances it was night. The shadow came swiftly so that one could detect its growing darkness. To have not known the cause of the phenomena would have been very disconcerting.”

While we had no reports of mother hens heading to the coop, one reader who tuned in noted that birds outside stopped chirping as darkness grew over the area.

Traffic-wise, in the hour following the event there was a noticeable number of vehicles with out-of-state license plates headed east on state Highway 7, and Interstate 30 westbound traffic had higher-than-normal volume. No traffic congestion was reported at the time of this writing. At 4:15 p.m., the iDriveArkansas traffic monitoring map showed slow-downs on the westbound lanes of Interstate 40 between Russellville and Fort Smith; elsewhere in the state showed clear roads.