Kingston (Madison County)

The unincorporated community of Kingston is located in northeastern Madison County. Many travelers pass through Kingston en route to the Buffalo River in Newton County, fourteen miles away.

This once vibrant town, situated in the Kings River Valley, may have been named for Henry King, who died following a fall 1827 and was buried beside Kings River (for whom it was named), or for several King families who were prominent in the earliest years. However, it is most likely that the name came from blacksmith William King Johnston who, in 1853, hired a surveyor to plat the town on land he owned.

The first post office was established in 1856. The 1860 census shows a town comprising six merchants, two wagoners, one physician, one blacksmith, and two farmers, living in just eight households.

During the Civil War, Missouri bushwhackers burned thirty-five homes, sparing only two buildings; the town rebuilt following the war. Early industry included a flour mill, built in 1898, and a plant that made wooden spokes for wagon and buggy wheels, built in 1907. This burned in 1929 and was rebuilt as a mill that made barrel staves from white oak timber. In early 1933, when it became known that Prohibition was likely to be repealed, stave mills in northwestern Arkansas were inundated with orders. Mills at Kingston and Pettigrew (Madison County) reportedly ran full time to keep up with orders, but Kingston’s mill was defunct by 1940.

Starting in the 1920s, Kingston gained a telephone company, a tomato cannery, a movie theater, a Ford dealership, a real estate agent, blacksmiths, a barbershop, doctors’ offices and drugstores, a hotel, saloons, restaurants, and multiple mercantile or general stores, as well as a Masonic lodge and an Odd Fellows hall.

Kingston in the early 1900s had a reputation for rowdy behavior, with fighting frequently taking place in the vicinity of the drinking establishments (one of which was named the Green Lizard saloon). Except for Civil War–era killings of civilians, the earliest recorded murder was that of Jefferson Davis Carroll, the twenty-year-old son of Eureka Springs (Carroll County) mayor John Carroll. He was gunned down by Frank Jenkins, who fled and was not captured. Carroll’s tombstone is inscribed, “Murdered June 24, 1881, at Kingston Ark.” Another crime, in 1929, was the killing of Clarence Elzey by Ross Parker, presumably out of revenge for Elzey having shot Parker in 1917, which paralyzed him. (The jury at Parker’s trial could not reach a verdict.)

Although various Christian denominations created brush arbors, campgrounds, and, eventually, churches in the early years, the Goodspeed history of the area credits Rev. Andrew Buchanan, an early Cumberland Presbyterian minister, with preaching the first sermon, presumably sometime in the early 1830s. The first Presbyterian church was organized in 1910. The Reverend Elmer Bouher was sent there in 1917 and began outreach programs that attracted national publicity, prompting the wealthy Brick Church of Rochester, New York, to fund mission work in Kingston. This culminated, in 1923, in breaking ground for an ambitious building project. Ultimately, a large, New England–style church with an attached high school would rise on “Community Hill” overlooking the town, after which the original church was converted for use as a hospital. Local people contributed their land, labor, money, building materials, and teams to this project, with the Rochester congregation sending money, clothing, books, hospital equipment, and a pipe organ.

The school (promoted as “The Little Harvard of the Hills”) had a large library and offered standard subjects as well as physiology and hygiene, “expression,” agriculture, and, in the 1940s, woodworking. The expectation was that students would use what they learned in agriculture and home economics classes to improve their families’ lives and farming practices. The first high school graduate received a diploma in 1925; the church was dedicated in June 1926.

Folklorist and writer Otto Ernest Rayburn taught and also coached basketball at the high school (1924–1929), attracting Ted Richmond to the project to serve as the director of “Boys Work,” edit Rayburn’s Ozark Life: The Mirror of the Ozarks, and serve as business manager of the school’s Kingskrafter Press, which printed Ozark Life along with Rayburn’s other short-lived folklore publications, a town newspaper, and the school yearbook. Rayburn also invited well-known writers and folklorists (including Bernie Babcock and May Kennedy McCord) to speak to his high school classes.

“The Kings-Plan” (a.k.a. the Kingston Plan) for the school was intended to be a template for other churches and schools to follow but ultimately proved to be unsustainable. Following Bouher’s departure in 1929 and Rayburn’s in 1930, the project began to decline, although it survived the Great Depression. In 1943, the Presbyterian Board of Missions withdrew its financial support, and the project was over.

Facing rural school consolidation and denied use of the deteriorating high school building, Kingston began building its own school in 1950. The Presbyterian Board maintained complete ownership of the property and sold off assets and dismantled and removed the combined church and school buildings in 1951.

The Bank of Kingston was robbed twice, once in 1953 and again in 1967. Both times, the bank’s cashier, Wilson Bunch, was held up at gunpoint by local men who were almost immediately captured and sentenced to fifteen or more years of jail time.

During the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, Kingston was promoted in the pages of Mother Earth News and became a destination for land-seekers and communes. Cabins, geodesic domes, A-frames, and underground dwellings can still be found outside of town in the twenty-first century.

In 1980, Jim and Susan McDougal bought the Bank of Kingston, renaming it Madison Bank and Trust. Two years earlier, in 1978, the McDougals and Bill and Hillary Clinton had formed Whitewater Development Corporation to sell tracts of vacation land in Marion County but lost their investment when real estate prices fell. Jim McDougal also bought a Woodruff County savings and loan in 1982, which he renamed Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan.

In 1994, Congress launched a series of investigations into both Whitewater and Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan (by then insolvent and in conservatorship), led by special counsel Kenneth Starr. During the ensuing four-year-long investigation, federal agents literally descended on the bank, landing near the square in a helicopter, and then spent two weeks combing through bank records. Bank president Gary Bunch was called before the Whitewater grand jury three times to testify, but, ultimately, no illegalities were found.

The McDougals, who had the building restored to its original 1911 appearance (complete with pressed-tin ceilings, ornate tellers’ cages, and barrel-shaped safe) sold the bank in 1986. In 2003, it was sold to the First National Bank of Green Forest (Carroll County); the name was changed to Anstaff.

In the twenty-first century, the bank and post office are in operation, as is a thriving farm store. The Kingston Library, founded in 1983 in a decommissioned bookmobile, has both a main building and an annex. Kingston’s school is located a short distance from the town square.

The New York Times favorably reviewed the Kingston Café in the late 1980s; the Bunch mercantile store and the bank are both listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and two other buildings on the town square served backdrops on May 30, 2003, for scenes in the movie Chrystal, directed by Ray McKinnon and starring Billy Bob Thornton. Several pieces of Kingston real estate, including two historic buildings on the square, were purchased by the Runway Group of Bentonville (Benton County), founded by two grandsons of Walmart founder Sam Walton.

For additional information:
Bowden, Bill. “Waltons Buy Historic Buildings in Kingston.” Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, November 6, 2023. https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2023/nov/06/waltons-buy-historic-buildings-in-kingston/ (accessed December 19, 2024).

Burnett, Abby. When the Presbyterians Came to Kingston; Kingston Community Church, 1917–1951. Kingston, AR: Bradshaw Mt. Publishers, 2000.

Campbell, Thomas H. Arkansas Cumberland Presbyterians, 1812–1984, A People of Faith. Memphis, TN: Arkansas Synod of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, 1985.

Goodspeed’s History of Benton, Washington, Carroll, Madison, Crawford, Franklin, and Sebastian Counties, Arkansas. Chicago: Goodspeed Publishing Co., 1889.

A History of Kingston, Kingston High School History Class, Kingston School, 1972–1973. Kingston, AR: Friends of the Kingston Community Library, 2023.

Jazbinschek, Marian. “Kingston.” Madison County Record, June 5, 2003, 9.

Madison County Cemetery Book #8. Huntsville, AR: Madison County Genealogical & Historical Society, 2007.

“Madison County Stave Industry Gets Publicity; One Tree Reported to Have Brought Owner $51.20 at Mill.” Madison County Record, February 23, 1933, p. 1.

“Pioneer Identity… Retained by Kingston.” Carroll County Historical Society Quarterly 21 (Autumn 1976): 1–15.

Rayburn, Otto Ernest. Forty Years in the Ozarks; An Autobiography. Eureka Springs, AR: Ozark Guide Press, 1957.

Roberts, Stacey. “Banking on History; Little Kingston Bank Branch Has Some Big Stories in Its Past.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, August 24, 2008, section W.

Sisk, Gloria. Madison County Remembrances of the Past. Arkansas Sesquicentennial, official sponsor, 1986.

Abby Burnett
Kingston, Arkansas