Entry Type: Place - Starting with F

Fifty-Six (Stone County)

Fifty-Six is one of two cities in Stone County. It stands on State Highway 14 in the northern part of the county. Fifty-Six (sometimes spelled without the hyphen) is located near Blanchard Springs Caverns, one of the most visited tourist sites in the Ozark National Forest. The forested hills and mountains of northern Arkansas were claimed as hunting and fishing land by the Osage, who lived in southern Missouri, when the United States first acquired the land as part of the Louisiana Purchase. White settlers gradually arrived in the area, but the rugged land remained only sparsely settled for many years. Stone County, which was formed in 1873 from parts of four other counties, had about 5,000 residents at the …

Files Cemetery

The Files Cemetery in Hot Springs (Garland County) is located on a quarter-acre lot off Arkansas Highway 7 South, on Files Road. It has been the resting place of Ruth Coker Burks’s family since the late 1880s. The oldest headstone dates back to the mid-1880s and the most recent was from 2019. Aside from the Burks family, the cemetery is also reportedly the burial place for more than three dozen men who died from AIDS in the 1980s. While most of the headstones in the cemetery are simple rectangles with name, birthdate, and death date, and occasionally a cross or flower engraved, some are marked with symbols and iconography. One such headstone is that of Emma L. Files Burrough, which …

First Baptist Church (Little Rock)

aka: EMOBA
aka: Museum of Black Arkansans and Performing Arts Center
The historic building of First Baptist Church of Little Rock (Pulaski County) is located at the corner of 12th and Louisiana streets just south of downtown. Various congregations of First Baptist worshiped in locations around the city throughout the 1800s. In 1889, First Baptist purchased a new lot and began construction on a large brick church at the historic site of 12th and Louisiana streets. The current building was built on the same site in 1941–42 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 21, 1994. In 1974, the First Baptist congregation moved to west Little Rock. The buildings on Louisiana remained unused until 1993, when Ernestine (Ernie) Dodson purchased the buildings on Louisiana to create …

Fisher (Poinsett County)

Fisher is located on U.S. Highway 49 in the southwest corner of Poinsett County. Like many other Arkansas cities, Fisher owes its existence to the railroad industry and the lumber industry. In the nineteenth century, western Poinsett County was a flood-prone hardwood forest. A road connecting Helena (Phillips County) to Batesville (Independence County) ran across the future site of Fisher, but no families chose to live in the area until after the Civil War. Reportedly, the first building erected in what would be Fisher was a double-pen log cabin built by Allen Steelman in about 1875. Steelman’s son-in-law, Shep Pope, lived in the other half of the cabin. Local historians have written that, following the death of Steelman, his widow married Charley …

Fitzhugh (Woodruff County)

Fitzhugh (Woodruff County) is a community six miles northeast of the county seat of Augusta (Woodruff County). Named for Rufus K. Fitzhugh Jr., the community developed and grew around his 800-acre plantation. Over time, two schools, a cotton gin, churches, and a general mercantile store came to be located at Fitzhugh; the area is mostly large farm fields in the twenty-first century, with only a few residences. Early settlers to the Fitzhugh community were attracted by the area’s rich alluvial soil deposits that became so profitable for cotton production in the nineteenth century. Area farms benefited from Fitzhugh’s proximity to the White River just a few miles west. In 1859, Rufus King Fitzhugh Sr. brought his family and a large …

Flippin (Marion County)

Hometown of the internationally recognized Ranger Boats bass boat manufacturer, Flippin (Marion County) is located seven miles from the county seat of Yellville (Marion County) and is surrounded by areas offering a wealth of recreational opportunities. The city of Flippin began as a small community outside the present-day city limits, near the site of what today serves as Flippin’s airport. Here, the first families settled in an area called the Barrens. Established sometime in the early 1800s, the Barrens was a small settlement that included a general store, flour mill, and cotton gin. The name later changed, and local legend purports that the owner of the general store, a man named Johnson, was not pleased with the wares being sold …

Floral (Independence County)

Floral is a community in Independence County located south-southwest of the county seat of Batesville (Independence County). Floral is believed to have received its name from the beautiful flowers that grow in the area, but may have been named for the Floral family who lived in the area at one time. An early pioneer in the region was John (Johnny) Thomas, who was born in 1814 in Alabama. He and his family crossed the Mississippi River and settled in Arkansas by the 1840s; the 1860 census reported him living at Round Pond in Independence County. The same census also listed the area’s first doctor, Sterling Wesley Allen, who had come from Tennessee. During the Civil War, lawless bands roamed the …

Fordyce (Dallas County)

Located at the intersection of Highways 167 and 79 in south central Arkansas, Fordyce was established in 1882 and named for Colonel Samuel Wesley Fordyce, a railroad builder and developer. It has long been a center for the timber industry in southern Arkansas. Pre-European Exploration Prior to European settlement, present-day Fordyce was inhabited by ancestors of the Caddo. Although no historic Caddo communities existed there, artifacts of Native American life are occasionally found in the area. Louisiana Purchase through Reconstruction Fordyce was a relatively late bloomer in Dallas County as compared to centrally located Princeton (Dallas County), which was incorporated in 1849 and served as the first county seat, and Tulip (Dallas County), which was considered the cultural center of …