Mallettown (Conway County)

Mallettown (sometimes rendered as Mallet Town) is an unincorporated settlement in eastern Conway County near the confluence of Cove Creek and Cadron Creek. It is best known for its historic church (called the Mallettown Community Church in the twenty-first century) and cemetery.

Settlers found their way up the Arkansas River and into the Cadron Creek and Cove Creek area during territorial days. Some land patents in the region predate the formation of Conway County in 1825. The family for whom Mallettown was named arrived in 1841. Their ancestors had come to Virginia from the Bordeaux region in France in 1699. Jesse Mallett Jr. was born in Georgia in 1803 and moved with his young family to Arkansas nearly forty years later. Jesse’s son John Mallett was a farmer and Methodist minister who was the likely founder of the Friendship Methodist Church in 1878. Another son, George Washington Mallett, cleared timber and farmed 600 acres, becoming one of the prominent landowners of the area. He and his wife Henrietta (who was descended from Italian immigrants) donated one and a half acres of land to Friendship Methodist Church to be used for a cemetery. The donation was made in 1887, although the earliest burial on the land had taken place in 1860.

The Malletts continued to clear and farm the land, although they never sought to incorporate a community around their landholdings. A post office, called Mallett, was created in 1901 but closed the same year, with mail sent to nearby Springfield (Conway County). The region experienced floods in 1924, 1926, 1957, and 1982, as well as destructive tornadoes in 1937. Musician Wayland Holyfield was born in Mallettown in 1942.

The congregation founded as Friendship Methodist Church was part of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South until mergers brought it into the United Methodist Church. The current structure was built after World War II from local rock under the supervision of stone mason Silas Owens. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.

The cemetery associated with the church was surveyed in 2007, at which time 278 burials were noted. The well-tended cemetery remains active in the twenty-first century. A concrete picnic bench was installed outside the gate to the cemetery in 1994.

Some of the land along Cove Creek was acquired for preservation by the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission. With the help of Arkansas’s Master Naturalists, invasive plants were removed to preserve the cedar and hardwood forests and to provide space for native wildflowers. A primitive foot trail loops roughly a mile through the preserved wilderness, with outlooks along the creek for viewing the layered sandstone bluff and a small waterfall.

Mallettown achieved brief notoriety in 2014 when search engines began advertising fictitious businesses in the community. Websites advertised softball leagues, pet parlors, boat rentals, and beach campgrounds, among other listings, none of which existed in or near the community. Some authorities suggested that the invention was fueled by attention focused on Ryan Mallett, a football player who started as quarterback for the Arkansas Razorbacks and later had a career in the National Football League (NFL). Mallett was descended from the family for whom the unincorporated community is named, although he was born in Batesville (Independence County) and never lived in Conway County. Mallett died in 2023 and is buried in the Mallettown Cemetery.

Mallettown lay in the path of greatest totality during the Solar Eclipse of 2024 and was visited by people within the state and beyond.

For additional information:
Conway County—Our Land, Our Home, Our People. Little Rock: Historical Publications of Arkansas, 1989, 1992.

Conway County Heritage: Then and Now. Nashville, TN: Turner Publishing Company, 2006.

Cove Creek Natural Area. Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission. https://www.arkansasheritage.com/arkansas-natural-heritage/naturalareas/find-a-natural-area/cove-creek-natural-area (accessed December 11, 2024).

Grossman, Daniel. “Small Arkansas Town Possible Victim of Big Scam.” KTHV, September 5, 2014. Online at https://www.thv11.com/article/news/local/small-arkansas-town-possible-victim-of-big-scam/91-287051414 (accessed December 11, 2024).

“Mallettown Cemetery.” Find a Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/54891/mallettown-cemetery (accessed December 11, 2024).

“Mallettown United Methodist Church.” National Register of Historic Places nomination form, 2005. On file at Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, Little Rock, Arkansas. Online at https://www.arkansasheritage.com/docs/default-source/national-registry/CN0332-pdf (accessed December 11, 2024).

Steven Teske
CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies