Entry Category: Calhoun

Hampton has served as the seat of Calhoun County since the county was created in 1850, and it remains the county’s most populous city. Louisiana Purchase through Early Statehood The first white person to patent a claim in the area of what is now Hampton was Nathaniel Hunt of Tennessee, who arrived in 1848. He established a farm on the north side of what was later the Hampton and Warren Road. When Calhoun County was created in 1850, a county seat was established near Hunt’s farm due to its central location and named Hampton for Colonel John R. Hampton, a state senator. Oliver Hazard Perry Black of Union County settled in Hampton around 1850, starting the first store there. In …

Established as a railroad depot early in the twentieth century, the town of Harrell is in eastern Calhoun County, about five miles east of Hampton (Calhoun County), the county seat. Harrell still maintains a working sawmill in the twenty-first century. Calhoun County is part of the Gulf Coastal Plain. Caddo lived in these forested hills long before European exploration, and the county contains many reminders of their presence, including two prehistoric mounds and roughly 350 archaeological sites. European explorers entered the area by means of the Ouachita River, but more inland areas like what would become Harrell were not frequented until long after the county was created in 1850. After the Civil War, northern developers began to purchase land in southern Arkansas to …

The city of Thornton developed on the St. Louis and Southwestern Railway (often called the Cotton Belt) four miles southwest of Fordyce (Dallas County) in 1883. A center of the timber industry, it became, for a time, the largest city in Calhoun County. Evidence of prehistoric activity in the region that would become Calhoun County is seen in several Native American mounds located in the county. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the area was understood to belong to the Caddo, but their dwellings tended to be in river valleys to the south of the heavy pine forests of south-central Arkansas. White settlers did not make a permanent home in the pine forests until after the Civil War, when …

Tinsman is a town in eastern Calhoun County. Once important as a junction for the Rock Island Railroad, the town has faded considerably since the decline of the railroad. Until the arrival of European and American settlers, the forested hills of Calhoun County were only sparsely settled, although the Caddo lived in the area perhaps as much as 5,000 years ago. Covered with pine, oak, cypress, red gum, and hickory trees, the region was not welcoming to early settlers, although some did arrive in the 1840s and 1850s, mostly from Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee. Calhoun County was largely untouched by the Civil War, although roughly 400 men from the county fought in the war, most of them for the Confederacy. Late …