Entry Type: Place

Cossatot River State Park-Natural Area

The Cossatot River State Park–Natural Area conserves a twelve-and-one-half-mile stretch of the Cossatot River, a southwest Arkansas stream included by the legislature in the state’s Natural and Scenic Rivers System. The National Park Service has designated the Cossatot’s upper reaches as a National Wild and Scenic River. The upper Cossatot is free of impoundments, and its shoreline is largely primitive and undeveloped. Within the park, there are over thirty rare plant and animal species, many of which are endemic to the Ouachita Mountains. The idea of establishing a natural area along the upper Cossatot surfaced in 1974, shortly after the Arkansas Environmental Preservation Commission was created. The panel was subsequently renamed the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission. In October 1975, its …

Cottage Courts Historic District

Cottage Courts Historic District is a motel located at 603 Park Avenue in Hot Springs (Garland County). Constructed in 1950, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places on February 11, 2004. Park Avenue was an important transportation route in the early twentieth century, as travelers from Little Rock (Pulaski County) and other cities to the north of Hot Springs used the road to reach the growing tourist town. Service stations, lodging, and other amenities were constructed along the road to serve these visitors. Cottage Courts (or Court) was constructed late in this period and was designed as a motel rather than a traditional tourist court as many others had been in Hot Springs. The units are joined …

Cotter (Baxter County)

Cotter, situated along the White River in Baxter County, emerged in the early twentieth century as an important railroad city of the White River Railway, a division of the Missouri Pacific Railroad. The city is today well known as a destination for trout fishing, billing itself as “Trout Capital, U.S.A.” Cotter got its start in late 1902 when the Red Bud Realty Company, which was organized by White River Railway attorney Walker V. Powell and certain local citizens, leased land for the railway. About forty acres were reserved for railroad use, including depots, a terminal yard, and an engine facility. The city grew like many other railroad-related boomtowns of the era. The post office was established on January 26, 1903. …

Cotton Plant (Woodruff County)

Cotton Plant, once the cultural center of Woodruff County, is in a rich cotton-producing area. Though the population has dwindled, it is still one of the most historical sections of the county. Louisiana Purchase through Early Statehood In 1820, the first white men came to the area from Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia, and the Carolinas. They were settlers who subsisted on hunting and on trade. The small settlement was first called Richmond, though it is not known why, and included a blacksmith’s shop and a grocery store. In 1832, a group of settlers arrived from Kentucky and took up squatters’ claims. William Lynch arrived from Mississippi in 1846 and built a house and a store. Beside the store, he planted cottonseed …

Cotton Plant Academy

Cotton Plant Academy, located in Cotton Plant (Woodruff County), was a co-educational boarding school operated by the Presbyterian Board of Missions for Freedmen. This board, part of the “Northern” Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), was responsible for founding schools for African Americans across the South after the Civil War. The first Presbyterian schools for freed slaves in the South opened in the 1860s, but the board did not open schools in Arkansas until the 1880s, when a new presbytery had been established in the state and numbers of African Americans from the eastern states were resettling there. The Cotton Plant Academy started out in the old Jerry Clark home during the 1880s. Later, it was located in a small church near the …

Couchwood Historic District

The Couchwood Historic District is the summer vacation estate of the late Harvey Couch (1877–1941). Couch founded Arkansas Power and Light (AP&L), was president of the Louisiana and Arkansas Railway and Kansas City Southern Railway, and was a developer of rural telephone systems in northern Louisiana and southern Arkansas. Couchwood consists of eight buildings on 170 acres and sits on a peninsula overlooking Lake Catherine between Hot Springs (Garland County) and Malvern (Hot Spring County). The property remains in the Couch family and is not open to the public. During the late 1920s and 1930s, notables such as future president Herbert Hoover and humorist Will Rogers visited Couchwood. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt also visited Couchwood during the 1936 Arkansas centennial …

Counties

Counties are administrative and political sub-units of a state. Some states, particularly Alaska and Louisiana, use the terms “borough” and “parish,” respectively, to designate the same type of entity. The county government is based within a community designated the county seat and typically consists of a county judge (who serves as the chief executive officer), county clerk, circuit clerk, assessor, sheriff, coroner, and the legislative body known as the quorum court; some counties have or had other positions such as county superintendent, surveyor, or collector. Some counties possess dual county seats due to local geographical conditions making travel to a single county seat difficult at certain times of the year, as with some counties that are divided by a river. …

Cove (Polk County)

Cove is a town on U.S. Highway 71 in western Polk County. It is home to Van-Cove High School, part of the Cossatot River School District. The rugged hills of the Ouachita Mountains remained sparsely settled until after the Civil War, although Cove appears on maps as early as the 1850s. It is not clear why the name Cove was chosen for the community. The Skirmish of Sulphur Springs was fought near the location of Cove on January 25, 1864. Henry McDaniel purchased land in the area in 1876 and began clearing land for his farming operation. By 1890, Cove was noted as “an enterprising and good business village” with five general stores, a drugstore, three blacksmith shops, a wagon …

Cove Creek (Hot Spring County)

Cove Creek is an unincorporated community in Hot Spring County. Located about six miles northwest of Malvern (Hot Spring County), the community is directly south of Magnet Cove (Hot Spring County) and directly east of Jones Mills (Hot Spring County). An alternate name of the community is LeCroy, named after a local landowner. Early landowners in the area included John M. Ross, who obtained 162 acres in the section in 1858 using Choctaw scrip. Nehemiah Woods obtained 160 acres the same year, also using Choctaw scrip. Settlement of the area occurred slowly until the construction of the Diamond Joe Railroad. Officially known as the Hot Springs Branch Railroad, the more colorful nickname honored founder Joseph Reynolds. A section crew stationed …