Entry Type: Place - Starting with G

Goshen (Washington County)

The city of Goshen is a residential community in Washington County, ten miles east of Fayetteville (Washington County) on Highway 45. Although the community was named and settled early in the nineteenth century, Goshen did not incorporate as a city until 1982. Eastern Washington County was known for farmland, timber, and game when white settlers first came in the nineteenth century. James Caldwell and John Neill both owned land near the site of Goshen before the Civil War. Some sources claim that Goshen was settled in the late 1820s, but Caldwell’s land grant was not approved until 1843 and Neill’s in 1854. According to some sources, a road named Oxford Bend may have extended from Fayetteville to the settlement as …

Gosnell (Mississippi County)

The city of Gosnell is a bedroom community near Blytheville (Mississippi County), a few miles south of the Missouri bootheel in northeastern Arkansas. The region was lightly populated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Gosnell grew only as a result of its proximity to Eaker Air Force Base, remaining unincorporated until 1968. It has hosted the Cotton Pickin’ Festival and Tractor Pull every fall since 1991. Pre-European Exploration Like much of the Delta region along the Mississippi River in Arkansas, the area that would become Gosnell was inhabited by various Native American tribes. A fifteen-foot mound built during the Mississippian Period (AD 900–1600) stands about two miles southeast of Gosnell. This mound is surrounded by a large …

Gould (Lincoln County)

Gould is a city in eastern Lincoln County, situated on U.S. Highway 65 and on the Union Pacific Railroad. Formed as a railroad city in the early twentieth century, Gould received national notoriety in the twenty-first century because of the fervor of its local political confrontations. When Lincoln County was formed in 1871, the swampy land between the Arkansas River and Bayou Bartholomew was largely uninhabited. Between 1870 and 1873, construction of the Little Rock, Pine Bluff and New Orleans Railroad (which eventually became part of the Union Pacific) brought traffic through the area. The part of the line where Gould would soon be established was known briefly as Palmer Switch. George H. Joslyn Sr., the first county judge of Lincoln …

Governor Mike Huckabee Delta Rivers Nature Center

aka: Delta Rivers Nature Center
The Governor Mike Huckabee Delta Rivers Nature Center in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) is Arkansas’s first nature center. Located in Regional Park, it opened on July 28, 2001. It is run by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s Education Division. The construction of the center, originally known as the Delta Rivers Nature Center, was funded by a conservation sales tax passed in 1996. The center consists of a 13,000-square-foot main building with exhibits highlighting Delta wildlife and history; it also includes a large meeting facility, a working laboratory, and a nature store. Located outside the main building are two aquariums totaling 22,000 gallons in volume. They display fish and other aquatic species native to the region in a natural setting. …

Governor’s Mansion

aka: Arkansas Governor's Mansion
The Arkansas Governor’s Mansion, located on 8.5 acres on Center Street in the historic Quapaw Quarter of downtown Little Rock (Pulaski County), was established by an act of the state legislature in 1947. It was completed in January 1950 during Governor Sidney McMath’s term. Previously, Arkansas did not have an official residence for the governor of the state. The Governor’s Mansion Historic District is the area surrounding the Governor’s Mansion and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. In 1944, the Arkansas Federation of Women’s Clubs, led by its president, Agnes Bass Shinn of Harrison (Boone County), began a campaign for housing for the chief executive of the state. The first effort to obtain legislative funding for …

Governor’s Mansion Historic District

The Governor’s Mansion Historic District is the area surrounding the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 13, 1978, the district has been expanded three times. The first two expansions of the district came in 1988 and 2002. Including properties constructed between 1880 and 1965, the boundaries of the district as of 2020 are roughly Wright Avenue, South State Street, West 22nd Street, South Chester Street, and West Roosevelt Road. A total of 626 contributing structures were included in the district with the third boundary expansion in 2018. This expansion came from a comprehensive survey completed in 2016 by the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program. The district includes the namesake Governor’s …

Grady (Lincoln County)

Grady is a second-class city in northern Lincoln County. Located near the Cummins Unit of the Arkansas Department of Correction, the city is bisected by Business Highway 65 but bypassed by the main highway, which runs from northwest Arkansas to southeast Arkansas, including such cities as Harrison (Boone County), Conway (Faulkner County), Little Rock (Pulaski County), Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), and Eudora (Chicot County). The first settlers of Grady included John S. Hall, who came with his family from South Carolina in 1846, and J. P. Williams, who immigrated to Arkansas from Ireland. The settlement was first called Hall’s Landing, but when Williams built the first store in the community and helped to establish a post office in 1881, the …

Graham (Independence County)

The historic community of Graham was located in Washington Township near where Lock and Dam No. 3 on the White River is today. It is on the Lock 3/Webber Chapel Road near Pilgrim Holler, about two miles north-northwest of Bethesda (Independence County). The University of Arkansas Livestock and Forestry Station is located on land that was once part of Graham. Moses Graham was a son-in-law of Abraham Ruddell, who helped establish Ruddell Mill, one of the first water-powered mills in the White River valley. Graham owned a farm at Bell Point on the White River opposite the mouth of Salado Creek. In 1815, he was appointed, along with the widow of John C. Luttig, as administrator of the Luttig estate. …

Grand Glaise (Jackson County)

aka: Grand Glaize (Jackson County)
During its heyday in the 1850s, the river port town of Grand Glaise (Jackson County), located on one of the highest points on the banks of the White River, was one of the largest towns in the area. Before the Civil War, the town, located about ten miles downriver from present-day Newport (Jackson County), served as an area commercial hub. The first white settler, Stith Tucker, arrived in the area in about 1817. By the late 1820s, a thriving river port named Grand Glaize had begun to develop. The first steamboat in the port, the Laurel, docked there in 1829. Further growth was prompted by the construction of a road in 1847 connecting the town to Searcy (White County). Several …

Grand Prairie

The Grand Prairie is a subregion of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain (commonly called the Delta) in eastern Arkansas that is known today as a major site of rice cultivation. Prairie County takes its name from this subregion. Located between the bottomlands of the White River and the Arkansas River, it was once a large, flat area of native grassland stretching across what are now Arkansas, Prairie, Lonoke, and Monroe counties, distinguished from the surrounding Delta land, which was largely swampy land dominated by bottomland hardwood. However, since the clear cutting of the Delta, the Grand Prairie is no longer as distinct a feature, though it remains agriculturally significant. Native Americans inhabited and hunted upon the Grand Prairie; the Museum of …

Grannis (Polk County)

Grannis is located on U.S. Highway 71 in southern Polk County. Like many of the cities of southwestern Arkansas, Grannis began as a railroad depot and grew with the development of the timber industry, turning later to the fruit and poultry industries. The heavily wooded slopes of the Ouachita Mountains were uninviting to the cotton farmers who first settled the area, and no landowners appear in records of the Grannis vicinity prior to 1893. The oldest monument to any human presence in the region is a tombstone on a hilltop that is now the location of the Grannis cemetery. The name of the traveler buried there has been erased by weather, but the year 1881 is still legible on the monument. A …