Wayside (Hot Spring County)

Wayside is an unincorporated community in Hot Spring County. Located about one mile north of Point Cedar (Hot Spring County) and eight miles northwest of Bismarck (Hot Spring County), Wayside is closely tied with those nearby communities.

When settlers began arriving in the area, the land around Wayside belonged to Montgomery County. The area became part of Hot Spring County on April 4, 1873. The earliest settlers included William Kizzia and James Jackson, who together obtained an eighty-acre tract with a federal land patent in 1855. Kizzia obtained an additional forty acres to the south in 1859. He appeared in the 1860 federal census with his wife, Mary, and their two children.

Silas Jackson obtained a land patent for forty acres in April 1860, with another forty acres in July, and appears just after the Kizzia family in the 1860 census. Jackson lived with his wife, Mary, and their son, William, on their farm, which was valued at $200 and included two additional plots of land nearby with 120 acres.

One of the best-known residents of the Wayside area arrived in the 1870s. Born in Tennessee in 1836, Isiah B. Hill moved to the area with his wife, Harriet. The couple had seven children before Harriet’s death in the 1890s. Isiah married Annie Hughes Harrison around 1900, and they had one son, who joined Hill’s children and the six children Annie had from an earlier marriage. Isiah obtained a land patent for 160 acres in 1882 and also practiced law in Hot Springs (Garland County), traveling between Wayside and the courthouse in a horse-drawn buggy. It is unclear when Isiah Hill died, but he was buried alongside Harriet and one of their children on the property. By the 1980s, the area was overgrown and the graves lost, along with any evidence of the two-story home that Hill constructed. Annie remarried and moved to Oklahoma.

A post office operated at Wayside from 1881 to 1914. The area is served in the twenty-first century by the offices located in Amity (Clark County) and Bonnerdale (Hot Spring County). No information on stores or schools in the area exists, although the closeness of the community to Point Cedar likely allowed Wayside residents to utilize services there.

The area around Wayside is heavily forested and looks much the same as it did when the first settlers arrived. Few homes are located in the area, and the only business is a recycling drop-off location. Timber and cattle operations are in the area, and some residents travel to nearby cities for employment.

For additional information:
Kniffin, Edith Neal Hill. “Isiah B. Hill.” The Heritage 8 (1981): 87–88.

David Sesser
Southeastern Louisiana University