A small unincorporated community in Hot Spring County, Ebenezer is located about three miles southwest of Malvern (Hot Spring County) and less than two miles northeast of Central (Hot Spring County). The community is centered on U.S. Highway 67. Few people lived in the area before the Civil War. Small numbers of settlers began to arrive in the mid-1870s after the construction of the Cairo and Fulton Railroad about one mile to the west. The establishment of Malvern to the northeast in 1873 attracted people to the area, as large tracts of land were still available for settlement and the railroad offered a nearby option to ship goods to market. Early settlers included Huston Robinson, who obtained a land patent …
Located about six miles southwest of Malvern (Hot Spring County), four miles northeast of Donaldson (Hot Spring County), and two miles southwest of Etta (Hot Spring County), Elmore was an unincorporated community related to the timber industry in the late nineteenth century. John Kelly (J. K.) Hall was born in Hot Spring County in 1856. During the Civil War, his father, James Hall, died as a Confederate prisoner of war in St. Louis in 1862; James’s wife raised Hall and his siblings. After spending a few years in Texas, where he married Nancy Guinn Nichols, Hall returned to Hot Spring County and worked for the Christopher and Clark Lumber Company. Purchasing the company in 1886, he renamed it the J. …
Etta (Hot Spring County) was an unincorporated community located about six miles southwest of Malvern (Hot Spring County) and about two miles northeast of Elmore (Hot Spring County). Formerly a stop on the Iron Mountain Railroad, the community became depopulated in the early twenty-first century, with the land returning to timber production. Early landowners in the area included James Darnell, who obtained a federal land patent for eighty acres in 1881. Mary A. Williams, who was born around 1837 in Georgia, obtained eighty acres in 1882. In the 1880 federal census, a recently widowed Williams appears with her four sons and daughter; her youngest son was only two years old at the time. Her oldest sons, twenty-one-year-old Phillip and fifteen-year-old …