Entries - Entry Type: Place - Starting with S

The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) opened the Stuttgart Army Airfield in October 1942. The airfield was located in Prairie County on approximately 2,682 acres about seven miles north of Stuttgart (Arkansas County). The facility consisted of four 5,000-foot runways and facilities for 6,000 personnel. The USAAF trained pilots in the use of gliders from October 1942 to May 1943. This was the second, or advanced, phase of their training, and they learned to fly the WACO CG-4A “Hadrian.” This glider had plywood-covered wings that spanned eighty-three feet and a fabric-covered tube-structure fuselage that was forty-eight feet long. It could carry about thirteen men, or six men and a Jeep, or various other combinations, including ammo, supplies, and weapons. …

The Logan County town of Subiaco, midway between Fort Smith (Sebastian County) and Russellville (Pope County), straddles Highway 22, a major connecting roadway for the western Arkansas counties immediately south of the Arkansas River. The town takes its name from the nearby Subiaco Abbey, itself named for the Italian town where a Benedictine order originated in 1878. The town, granted a post office in 1910, formed when the railroad reached the area in June 1909. Although the railroad ceased operation in 1949, the town of Subiaco remains and continues to provide services to area residents, as well as to travelers and visitors to Subiaco Abbey and Academy. Construction of the Military Road from Little Rock (Pulaski County) to Fort Smith …

Subiaco Abbey and Academy, a Benedictine monastery and college-prep boarding school, began as St. Benedict’s Colony, established in 1877. St. Benedict’s Colony provided for the settlement of German-speaking immigrants in western Arkansas and laid the groundwork for the Subiaco Academy and Subiaco Abbey, both founded in 1891. The academy and abbey evolved over the last 100 years into the present Subiaco Abbey and Academy, located on extensive farmland in Logan County. By 1877, Abbot Martin Marty of St. Meinrad’s Abbey in southern Indiana was pursuing his dream of establishing a Benedictine mission on the western frontier. After hearing of the desire for a German Catholic colony in Arkansas, Marty contacted the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad in order to …

Located at the intersection of State Highways 211 and 328 in the northwestern corner of Clay County, about three miles south of the Arkansas-Missouri state line, Success has its origins as a timber town near the railroad. Settlers came slowly to northeastern Arkansas, both before and after Clay County was established in 1873 from parts of Randolph and Greene counties. The first settlers in the area that would become Success were associated first with the Heckt community that became Corning (Clay County) and then with the Bridgeport settlement that became Datto (Clay County). All this changed with the construction of the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway (later acquired by the Missouri Pacific Railroad) through Clay County. With modern …

Sulphur Rock, so named because there are two large sulphur springs in the area, is located approximately six miles east of Batesville (Independence County). In 1903, a writer referred to these springs as “living springs of pure, cold, sparkling water which contains [sic] valuable medical properties.” Although Sulphur Rock’s population has never exceeded 500, it was influential in the county for the decades around the end of the nineteenth century. Sulphur Rock was settled fairly early as compared to other communities because the area was located on the Old Military Road, which was widely used for travel to the Southwest during the early nineteenth century, continuing on through Little Rock (Pulaski County) and Washington (Hempstead County). The earliest post office …

Sulphur Springs in Benton County is only one of many communities in Arkansas that bear that name. Located near the Missouri and Oklahoma borders, it was an important spa and resort center in the late 1800s and early twentieth century as well as the location for a campus of what is now John Brown University (JBU) and facilities for Wycliffe Bible Translators. Post Reconstruction through the Gilded Age The original city site contained numerous natural mineral springs, including a rare lithium spring. The reported healing properties of these springs led to the creation of a small community; a post office was established on April 26, 1878, and the city was formally laid out in 1885. The first school opened later …

Originally named White Sulphur Springs, Sulphur Springs is an unincorporated, census-designated place (CDP) in Jefferson County located about two miles southwest of Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). It received its name due to its proximity to natural sulfur-rich springs. It was a spa and resort community during the mid-1800s and served as an important Confederate training and staging area during the Civil War. Following the war, the community once again returned to a resort community with dreams of expanding into a separate incorporated town. The expansion, however, was cut short by World War I, and the community was never incorporated. Following a flood that consumed much of southeast Arkansas in 1844, settlers began moving into the area southwest of Pine Bluff. …

In the twenty-first century, Sulphur Springs is nothing more than a few houses and a cemetery. However, in the early to mid-1800s, it was a popular medicinal resort known for its healing waters. The details of its discovery were not recorded, but by the early 1800s, the springs were known as far away as New Orleans, Louisiana, and Boston, Massachusetts, for their purported ability to treat kidney and stomach ailments. The first known advertisement for the springs was published in the May 1, 1841, issue of the Arkansas Gazette, in which proprietor V. T. Rogers stated, “The resort has opened for the season for entertainment for those in search of health and pleasure.” A similar advertisement ran in 1851; the …

The Sulphur Springs Cemetery in Yell County, considered a historical resource, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on February 21, 2012, under multiple criteria, including Criterion C and Criterion D, for the designation of burial places. Among many unmarked fieldstones, the cemetery holds the remains of Judge John F. Choate, a prominent community member who served as Yell County circuit clerk and Yell County judge. The cemetery is one of the only surviving structures from the region’s days as a medicinal resort destination. In the early to mid-1800s, Sulphur Springs (Yell County) was known throughout the United States for its healing waters, which contained minerals such as white and black sulfur, soda, and chalybeate. Spas were popular …

The city of Summit was built as a result of the construction of the White River Railway. Summit is a suburb of Yellville, the county seat of Marion County, and the two cities are separated by Division Street. Summit’s identity is so much overshadowed by Yellville’s that many people call it North Yellville. Northern Arkansas was home to various Native American tribes before European explorers and settlers arrived. The land that would become Summit was part of a large area given by treaty to the Cherokee, and the Cherokee at that time were joined by the Shawnee, who built the first houses in what would become the city of Yellville. Eventually, another treaty required the Cherokee and Shawnee to move farther …

Between 1890 and 1968, thousands of towns across the United States drove out their black populations or took steps to forbid African Americans from living in them. Thus were created “sundown towns,” so named because many marked their city limits with signs typically reading, “Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On You In Alix”—an Arkansas town in Franklin County that had such a sign around 1970. By 1970, when sundown towns were at their peak, more than half of all incorporated communities outside the traditional South probably excluded African Americans, including probably more than a hundred towns in the northwestern two-thirds of Arkansas. White residents of the traditional South rarely engaged in the practice; they kept African Americans down …

The term “sunken lands” (also called “sunk lands” or “sunk country”) refers to parts of Craighead, Mississippi, and Poinsett counties that shifted and sank during the New Madrid earthquakes which took place between 1811 and 1812. Because the land was submerged under water, claims to property based on riparian rights by large landowners generated controversy which lasted decades and ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court. When the New Madrid earthquakes began in December 1811, the territory which is today northeastern Arkansas was sparsely populated. An early chronicler described the earthquakes’ effect as the ground moving like waves on the land, when suddenly the earth would burst, sending up huge volumes of water and sand, leaving chasms where the earth had …

Sunnyside Plantation of Chicot County is synonymous with the immigration of Italian Catholics into the cotton fields of the Arkansas Delta. During the 1890s and early 1900s, Sunnyside Plantation was the largest Catholic colony of new immigrants in the state and the primary factor in attracting Italians to Arkansas. Almost all Italians had left by 1910, however, due to dissatisfaction with increasing poor working arrangements. In the later half of the nineteenth century, Austin Corbin of New York bought more than 10,000 acres of Chicot County land on the Mississippi River and established his Sunnyside Plantation. Under the auspices of the Sunnyside Company, Corbin consolidated several plantations and named the property after an area plantation that dated back to the …

Sunset is a largely African-American town north of Marion (Crittenden County) and adjacent to Interstate 55. A school building in Sunset is on the National Register of Historic Places. Quapaw lived in the area before European explorers first visited. Two Spanish land grants were bestowed before 1800 for the land where Sunset would be built. The land became part of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Cotton was grown on the land both before and after the Civil War. Many former slaves continued to live as tenant farmers in Crittenden County after the Civil War. Friendship Lodge No. 39, a Masonic association for African Americans, was organized in 1873. A school for African-American children was built in …

In 1980, Congress passed, and President Jimmy Carter signed, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), commonly known as the Superfund law. CERCLA was created to deal with abandoned sites of industrial pollution. The act imposed taxes and fines upon companies to recover clean-up costs, and also established containment procedures for the pollution at such sites. This followed several years of highly publicized incidents related to industrial pollution, such as the 1974 contamination of Times Beach, Missouri—which was later evacuated due to high levels of dioxin in the city’s soil and water—as well as the eventual relocation of residents from the notorious Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York, which was the site of a chemical dump …

The small, rural community of Sweet Home (Pulaski County) is a majority Black community in Pulaski County. Of more than two dozen communities in Arkansas named Sweet Home to have obtained a post office (done on May 29, 1877), this is the only community to have maintained it to the present. Its Hanger Cotton Gin is Arkansas’s oldest cotton gin on the National Register of Historic Places, dating back to at least the 1870s. From 1890 to 1955, Sweet Home housed Arkansas’s Confederate Soldiers’ Home until it moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County); only two entrance pillars and low parts of the front stone wall remain. Sweet Home had the state’s only Florence Crittenton Home for Black unwed mothers, begun …

Swifton is one of several Jackson County cities that were founded along the tracks of the Iron Mountain Railroad. Home to three notable names in baseball, including Baseball Hall of Fame third baseman George Kell, Swifton is also a landmark on Arkansas’s Rock ’n’ Roll Highway 67. Henry Hileman received a patent to the land on which Swifton would be built on November 27, 1820. Hileman obtained that patent with a scrip recognizing his service to the United States in the War of 1812. Other settlers joined Hileman in the area, and a Methodist church was established in 1860. Until construction of the railroad, however, settlement remained sparse in northern Jackson County. The Cairo and Fulton Railroad built a line through Jackson …