Entries - Entry Category: Baxter - Starting with B

  Big Flat is a town on State Highway 14, mostly in southern Baxter County but straddling the Searcy County line. It is just outside the Ozark National Forest. One of the earliest settlements of northern Arkansas, Big Flat long flourished because it was isolated from other settlements by the hills and forests of the region. The town did not incorporate, though, until 1939. Big Flat was named for a plateau in the Leatherwood Mountains of the Ozark Mountain range. For thousands of years, the area was visited by hunters, fishers, and gatherers of food; the Osage came down from what now is Missouri to collect food to bring back to their homes in the north. White settlers began to …

Briarcliff is a resort community located on Highway 5 between Mountain Home (Baxter County) and Norfork Lake. It is adjacent to the similar community of Salesville (Baxter County). The first non–Native American family to live on the land that is now Briarcliff was the James Tracy family. They were descendants of a French veteran of the American Revolutionary War who had lived in both North Carolina and South Carolina before moving west to seek new farmland. Tracy arrived in northern Arkansas in the 1850s and purchased land in what was then eastern Marion County. According to family accounts, Tracy was murdered and his store pillaged by freed slaves during the Civil War. His son continued to farm the land after …