Lawrence

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Entries - Entry Category: Lawrence - Starting with S

Saffell (Lawrence County)

Saffell is an unincorporated community in Reeds Creek Township located at the junction of Arkansas Highway 25 and Arkansas Highway 361 about three and a half miles south-southeast of Strawberry (Lawrence County). Saffell lies approximately four miles northwest of the confluence of the Strawberry and Black rivers. Farming is important to the livelihood of the community. In 2015, the population of the Saffell area was estimated at 190. Osage Indians once claimed the Strawberry and Black river bottoms, along with most of northern Arkansas, as their hunting grounds. Burial mounds are located across the Strawberry River from Saffell on the old White Plantation. French hunters, trappers, and fur traders, mostly from Canada, plied the Strawberry and Black rivers in the …

Sedgwick (Lawrence County)

Sedgwick, a town in eastern Lawrence County, is located on U.S. Highway 63 between Hoxie (Lawrence County) and Jonesboro (Craighead County). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Osage from farther north hunted and fished in the area that would become northeastern Arkansas, but they had no permanent settlements there. Even after Arkansas became a state, settlement in the Cache River basin remained sparse. Eventually, after the Civil War, investors began to consider harvesting the timber in this part of Arkansas. The Kansas City, Fort Scott and Memphis Railroad built a line in the 1880s that ran through Hoxie and Jonesboro on the way to Memphis, Tennessee. George Washington Sedgwick, one of the railroad’s organizers, built a sawmill near the …

Smithville (Lawrence County)

Smithville was the first county seat of present-day Lawrence County. Though it is largely abandoned today, Smithville was once a thriving trading center near the Strawberry River in the foothills of the extreme eastern Ozarks region. Louisiana Purchase through Early Statehood The Nathaniel McCarroll family probably settled first in the area, around 1808. Other settlers joined them throughout the next several decades, most arriving from places such as Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Missouri. By 1832, the area (then known as the Strawberry settlement due to the proximity of the Strawberry River) was populated enough to have the first post office erected within the modern boundaries of Lawrence County. In 1837, the redrawing of county lines forced Lawrence County to move its …

Strawberry (Lawrence County)

Although it was not incorporated until 1965, the town of Strawberry in southwestern Lawrence County represents one of the oldest white settlements in Arkansas. Unaffected by the Civil War and missed by the railroads, Strawberry was slow to develop, but it remains in the twenty-first century as the home of Hillcrest High School. Prior to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Osage from the north hunted and fished in northern Arkansas. White settlement quickly entered the territory, and the Strawberry River valley was one of the earliest areas to be populated. Although families did not gather into organized communities as was the case in Batesville (Independence County) and Davidsonville (Randolph County), William Taylor, Samuel Rayney, and Jacob Fortenberry came from Missouri …