Cities and Towns

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Entry Category: Cities and Towns - Starting with H

Hunter (Woodruff County)

Hunter of Woodruff County was a busy trading and shipping center during the late 1800s and early 1900s and attracted hunters from surrounding areas. The first settler of Hunter was Edward Shannon Hunt, a Civil War Union soldier from Ohio who served in the area. He admired the abundant game and fishing streams in the area and vowed to return and make his home there. Sometime in the 1870s, along with his family, he did just that. His wife, Elizabeth Ann, served as a midwife and doctor to the other settlers in the area. As more people moved west to settle, Elizabeth Ann set up a wayside inn on the Military Road to accommodate travelers. The place became known as …

Huntington (Sebastian County)

Huntington is a second-class city located in the coal-rich Arkansas River Valley of southern Sebastian County. Its fortunes rose and fell with the coal industry, but the city has revived in the twenty-first century, billing itself as a location with “quiet, comfortable, and affordable living.” Situated about twenty-five miles south of Fort Smith (Sebastian County), the land that would become the city of Huntington was purchased around 1888 by Levi Barrett, who almost immediately sold the land to the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Coal Company. Samuel Fellows had already begun a coal mine at nearby Cherokee Creek in June 1887 and had built a house on the hillside claimed by Barrett that same month. In time, three large coal mines …

Huntsville (Madison County)

Huntsville is the seat of Madison County, a rural county in the Arkansas Ozarks. Pre-European Exploration The area which is now Huntsville has been inhabited at least 10,000 years.  Early inhabitants lived in the White River lowlands, farming there and building some mound centers; the upland shelters served as storage areas, burial sites, and temporary camps.  Artifacts of the Mississippian culture have been found at the Huntsville Mounds, an archaeological site near the town.  By the historic period, all of what is now Madison County was part of the Osage hunting grounds.  Treaties in 1808 and 1825 ceded Osage interest in these lands to the United States.  The signature of Hurachais, the War Eagle, appears on the 1825 treaty; he is …

Hutchinson (Independence County)

The community of Hutchinson is located atop Hutchinson Mountain in Independence County, about eight miles from the county seat of Batesville. Families that settled in the area have remained there for generation after generation. Two of the first settlers on the mountain were William Goodman and Ziba Danual Barber from Tennessee. The families united when Ziba Barber married Permelia “Permiba” Goodman, William Goodman’s daughter. Family lore has it that Ziba was killed by jayhawkers during the Civil War in 1864. One of the couple’s sons, Andrew Jackson Barber, married Cynthia Ann “Sinthy” Graddy, the only child of another mountain pioneer, Lewis Graddy (or Grady). Lewis Graddy and his older brother, John Graddy, stopped in Independence County on their way to …

Huttig (Union County)

Huttig is a second-class city in Union County. Located two miles north of the Arkansas-Louisiana state line, the city was established as a timber industry company town. Huttig was the childhood home of civil rights activist Daisy Bates and also of musician Floyd Cramer. After the railroad arrived in Union County, the timber industry began to purchase property and hire workers. The Frost-Johnson timber company built a company town, which company president C. D. Johnson named Huttig for his friend, industrialist William Huttig. Anchored by the Union Saw Mill Company, the city quickly became the largest sawmill community in Union County and was the second-largest city in the county until the oil boom of the 1920s. The company built houses …