Counties, Cities, and Towns

Subcategories:
Clear

Entry Category: Counties, Cities, and Towns - Starting with P

Prairie County

Prairie County, located in central Arkansas, has two county seats, Des Arc and DeValls Bluff. An important agricultural center, Prairie County has a rich history as the state’s throughway for mail routes, steamboats, and trains. European Exploration and Settlement European exploration of the area began as early as the late seventeenth century. While the area became intermediately occupied by both the Spanish and French, the county remained vital to trade expeditions. The earliest recorded Euro-American settlement of Prairie County is debatable but can be placed in the late eighteenth century. French traders traveled up and down the White River in the early 1700s. Bear oil and skins, abundant in this area at the time, were sought-after commodities in the New …

Prairie Creek (Benton County)

Prairie Creek in Benton County began in the White River valley area as a small farming community made up of about three families. The creation of Beaver Lake in the 1960s transformed the region into a center of tourism. Now, it is a planned community development and is home to a number of retirees. Prairie Creek was established as a township in April 1859 through the efforts of John B. Putnam and fifty other citizens of the surrounding areas, including Sugar Creek, White River, and Big Spring. The township was created with land taken from these other townships. A three-mile stream fed by various other streams along the way ran through the area. This area continued as a small farming …

Prairie Grove (Washington County)

Prairie Grove is best known for the Civil War battle that occurred there in 1862, but it also has been an important agricultural community in northwest Arkansas, with its rich prairie land watered by the Illinois River. Throughout its history, Prairie Grove has been a dynamic small town offering unique amenities such as a state park, a family-owned local telephone company, and an aquatic park. Louisiana Purchase through Early Statehood About 1829, a hunter named Tom Wagnon claimed some land around a spring in present-day Mock Park in Prairie Grove. Soon after Wagnon began clearing the land, another newcomer, Reverend Andrew “Uncle Buck” Buchanan, arranged a deal in which Wagnon gave Buchanan the acreage in return for two good sermons. …

Prattsville (Grant County)

Prattsville is a city located on State Highway 270 in Grant County, a few miles west of Sheridan (Grant County). Although it did not incorporate as a town until 1962, Prattsville had already been continuously inhabited for more than 100 years, and the area shows evidence of human presence for many previous centuries. Prattsville reincorporated as a second-class city early in the twenty-first century. An archaeological survey conducted in 1973 found evidence of a prehistoric settlement in the vicinity of Prattsville. Native Americans had, however, already left the area before European explorers or American settlers arrived in the area. Early settlers in Arkansas created a number of roads, one of which ran through what was then Saline County, linking such …

Prescott (Nevada County)

Prescott, the county seat of Nevada County in southwest Arkansas, is also the largest city in the county. Originating as a railroad town, it remains a vital link on the land route between Little Rock (Pulaski County) and Texarkana (Miller County), as well as a local center of business and agriculture. As part of the West Gulf Coastal Plain, the land that now is Nevada County was sparsely populated both before and after the Louisiana Purchase added Arkansas to the United States. Caddo Indians moved through the area and inhabited some villages, and some European settlers made their homes along the rivers, but the land that is now Prescott remained wilderness, with a few cotton plantations introduced to the area …

Prim (Cleburne County)

Prim is an unincorporated community located at the junction of Arkansas Highway 225 (Sunny Slope Road) and Highway 263 (Prim Road), nine miles north-northeast of the resort area of Greers Ferry (Cleburne County) and ten miles north-northwest of Heber Springs (Cleburne County), the county seat. Devil’s Fork, a tributary of the Little Red River, is at Prim, and Turkey Creek is to the north. The Osage once lived in the area. In 1812, the year the Missouri Territory was carved from the Louisiana Territory, John Benedict and his wife, Rebecca Standlee Benedict, came from Kentucky—along with Rebecca’s three brothers—to settle in Arkansas. They cleared thirty acres of land and built two cabins on Little Red River below Devil’s Fork. The …

Princeton (Dallas County)

A once thriving town, Princeton had become a small community with a population of only thirteen by the 2020 federal census. Although it was the first seat of Dallas County, the town was supplanted by Fordyce (Dallas County) as the leading community in the county in the early twentieth century. Founded in 1845, Dallas County was formed from Clark and Bradley counties. The site for the town was selected later that year, and work began on a courthouse. An early name for the community was Dallastown. Winthrop Colbath received a federal land patent for the area that would become Princeton on July 10, 1848. The eighty-acre plot was divided into smaller lots and sold. Several public structures were built in …

Pulaski County

Pulaski County has a diverse population, economy, natural setting, and social structure influenced by state and local government, business and industry, and finance and nonprofit sectors. Three of Arkansas’s six natural divisions converge in Pulaski County—the Ouachita Mountains, the Mississippi Alluvial Plain (the Delta), and the Coastal Plain—representing the state’s wealth of flora, fauna, and geological features. Located in central Arkansas, Pulaski County is one of the state’s five original counties and has been at the center of state government, politics, business, art, and culture for almost two centuries. Pre-European Exploration The Plum Bayou culture flourished in central Arkansas between AD 600 and 1050, as can be seen in sites such as the Plum Bayou Mounds Archeological State Park in …

Pulaski Heights (Pulaski County)

Pulaski Heights, an affluent neighborhood in Little Rock (Pulaski County), was originally a suburban development located on the outskirts of the state’s capital city. Work began on the Pulaski Heights development in the late nineteenth century, and it incorporated as its own town in 1905. The Pulaski Heights development marked the beginning of Little Rock’s westward expansion, a trend that greatly accelerated in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Like many suburban developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was racially exclusive, enforcing an all-white residence primarily by means of restrictive covenants. Pulaski Heights was the project of Michigan industrialist Henry Franklin (H. F.) Auten, who settled in Little Rock by 1890 and later organized the …