Entries - County: Monroe - Starting with F

Fargo is a town on U.S. Highway 49 in northern Monroe County, north of Interstate 40. Fargo came into existence due to the railroad industry and later was home to a significant school for African Americans. Various Native American artifacts have been found in Monroe County, indicating that it has been inhabited at least sporadically for centuries. European hunters and trappers had arrived by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the county itself was established in 1829, several years before Arkansas became a state. The northern part of the county, drained by the Cache River, was largely uninhabited throughout the nineteenth century. The St. Louis Southwestern Railway, known as the Cotton Belt, was constructed across Arkansas from Texarkana (Miller …

Before the state of Arkansas made public funds available for segregated schools for black children, Floyd Brown, a graduate of Tuskegee Institute, founded and operated the Fargo Agricultural School (FAS) outside Brinkley (Monroe County). From 1920 to 1949, the private residential school offered “training for the head, hands and heart” and high school educations for hundreds of black youth at a time when the United States’ black population averaged five years or less of formal schooling. In early twentieth-century Arkansas, African-American children were seldom educated beyond the primary grades. In the 1920s and 1930s, most black Southerners were sharecroppers indebted to white landowners to whom they gave a share of their crops for rent. To supplement the family income, women …