Entry Type: Place

Coy (Lonoke County)

The story of Coy is the same as that of many rural Arkansas communities that have almost disappeared since the inception of the automobile and mechanized farming. It was the hub of the cotton growing and ginning industry in south Lonoke County from 1900 until the early 1960s. On November 3, 1896, Abby M. Coy—wife of “Colonel” Lucien W. Coy, who established the town—purchased the land that would become Coy from one F. Gates. Lucien Coy had been a first lieutenant with the Union in Missouri’s First Engineering Regiment, Company B, and he came south after the Civil War and engaged in lending money and land speculation in Little Rock (Pulaski County). The exact date of the town’s establishment is …

Craighead County

Craighead County is located in northeast Arkansas and was created as Arkansas’s fifty-eighth county in 1859. It is unusual not only in the circumstances of its creation and naming but also in that it has two county seats, Jonesboro and Lake City. The unique formation called Crowley’s Ridge runs through its center. Along with Jonesboro and Lake City, Craighead County also includes the towns of Bay, Black Oak, Bono, Brookland, Caraway, Cash, Claunch, Egypt, and Monette. It is the home of Arkansas State University (ASU), one of the state’s largest universities. Pre-European Exploration Of significance for early habitation of Craighead County is Crowley’s Ridge, a crescent-shaped outcropping running roughly from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to Helena-West Helena (Phillips County). It rises …

Crater of Diamonds State Park

Located on State Highway 301 in Pike County, the Crater of Diamonds State Park contains the world’s only diamond mine that is open to the public. John Wesley Huddleston, a farmer and sometime prospector, first found diamonds on the site in 1906. Huddleston’s discovery sparked a diamond rush in Pike County. Diamond-bearing soil was also found on Millard M. Mauney’s property that was adjacent to Huddleston’s. Prospectors and fortune hunters rushed to the area, and soon the town of Kimberly developed to accommodate the influx of people. Within a few years of the discovery, all the land on top of Prairie Creek Pipe was in the hands of two rival companies, Arkansas Diamond Company and Ozark Diamond Mines Corporation. The …

Crawford County

Crawford County is situated in northwest Arkansas in the Ozark Mountains. The Boston Mountains on the north and the Arkansas River Valley on the south provide a diverse landscape and play an important role in the economy of the past and present. The county is centrally located within the nation, thus allowing desirable north-south and east-west transportation networks to support industrialization, manufacturing, and tourism growth. Pre-European Exploration The area that became Crawford County has been inhabited since the end of the Ice Age, about 12,000 BC. Paleoindians hunted and gathered wild plants and other resources, residing in open air campsites and occasionally using rock shelters. Agricultural settlements began to be established during the Mississippian Period (AD 900—1600). Pictographs (paintings on …

Crawfordsville (Crittenden County)

Crawfordsville is a second-class city located on U.S. Highway 64 in central Crittenden County, about halfway between Earle (Crittenden County) and Marion (Crittenden County). Crawfordsville benefits from a slightly higher elevation (ten to fifteen feet) in comparison to its immediate neighbors, and its history is largely unblemished by the devastation that floods have exacted on nearby communities. City establishment began as an outgrowth of the timber industry in eastern Arkansas during the post–Civil War era, and the opening of a railroad line through the community sustained city growth as its economy transitioned from timber to farming during the early twentieth century. Unlike other communities in Crittenden County that diminished or disappeared once the timber-rich acreage had been cleared, Crawfordsville continued …

Crenshaw Site

The Crenshaw Site was a large village and ceremonial center occupied from about AD 700 to 1400 along the Red River in Miller County in southwestern Arkansas; the site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The large size of the site (estimated at approximately eighty acres), along with limited archaeological investigations, hampers reconstruction of the site’s cultural history. The prevailing archaeological interpretation of the site is that it was first occupied by the Fourche Maline culture (AD 700–900) and developed into a significant village. Numerous earthworks were constructed, including at least four (and perhaps six) mounds and a raised causeway that connected two of the larger mounds. Evidence for a sizeable population includes a midden deposit (soil …

Crescent Hotel

The Crescent Hotel was built in 1886 in Eureka Springs (Carroll County) by the Eureka Improvement Company, the president of which was former governor Powell Clayton. The organization purchased twenty-seven acres of wooded land for the site of the hotel and hired Isaac S. Taylor from St. Louis, Missouri, as architect for the project. The massive eighteen-inch-thick stones used for the body of the hotel were made of limestone, hand-carved from a quarry on the White River near Beaver (Carroll County) by a crew of Irish workers. These stones were hauled to the site of the hotel by trains and specially constructed wagons, and were placed in such a fashion that no mortar was needed. The hotel boasted every modern …

Crittenden County

  Crittenden County is located in east-central Arkansas. Its eastern and southern boundaries are the Mississippi River. To its west are Lee, St. Francis, and Cross counties. Mississippi County and Poinsett County form its northern borders. According to historian Margaret Woolfolk, “Crittenden is entirely on the bottom land of the Mississippi River….Total thickness of the sediment exceeds 100 feet.” Because of its astonishing fertility, the area became an obvious location for agricultural development. In the modern era, it has also become a major transportation thoroughfare. European Exploration and Settlement Artifacts found in Crittenden County—including effigy pipes, stone ear plugs, and ornaments—testify to a long habitation of the area by Native Americans. Some archaeologists place the location of Pacaha, visited by …

Crooked Creek (Watershed)

Crooked Creek is a 129 km (80 mi.) Ozark highland White River tributary in Boone, Marion, and Newton counties of northern Arkansas. The stream’s headwaters (36°06′47″N, 93°02′19″W) begin at Sulphur Spring (Newton County) on the north side of Sulphur Mountain just south of Harrison (Boone County) and east of Marble Falls (Newton County), the location of Dogpatch USA, and flow north, passing under Arkansas Highway 206 just west of Elmwood (Boone County). The stream continues north, traveling parallel (eastward) to Arkansas Highway 7, passing through the southeastern part of Harrison and under U.S. Highway 65. The stream immediately turns eastward, beginning a long series of meanders by which it gained its name. Crooked Creek then turns southeast, passing the communities …

Cross and Nelson Hall Historic District

The Cross and Nelson Hall Historic District consists of two former dormitories located at 100 East University on the campus of Southern Arkansas University (SAU) in Magnolia (Columbia County). These were built in 1936 with assistance from the Public Works Administration (PWA), a Depression-era federal relief agency. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 20, 2010. The Third District Agricultural School, which would evolve into Southern Arkansas University, was one of four such schools created through Act 100 of 1909 of the Arkansas General Assembly, with its first classes meeting in 1911. At the time, the school offered a four-year high school diploma program. By the mid-1920s, the school had received junior college status …

Cross County

Cross County is one of the state’s leading producers of soybeans and rice, the location of the only copper tube mill in Arkansas, and the home of two state parks: Village Creek State Park and Parkin Archeological State Park. Created during the Civil War, the county was largely shaped by railroad development during the Gilded Age, with small industry and tourism becoming more of a focus in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Geologically, the county is divided roughly into thirds. Crowley’s Ridge, a glacial age erosional remnant covered with a unique loessal topsoil, traverses the county north to south, rising seventy-five to 100 feet above ancient deltaic alluvial floodplains on either side. The eastern third is drained primarily …

Cross Roads (Hot Spring County)

Cross Roads is an unincorporated community located in far western Hot Spring County. It is also known as Crossroads. The community is located about one mile southwest of Bonnerdale (Hot Spring County) and nine miles northeast of Glenwood (Pike County). Cross Roads is located about three-quarters of a mile east of the Montgomery County line. The community of Bismarck (Hot Spring County) was also known as Cross Roads in the nineteenth century. The first settlers arrived in the area in the early nineteenth century, but the first federal land patents in the area were not issued until 1897. In that year, Jesse and Samuel Ballard each obtained about 160 acres in the Cross Roads area. Samuel Ballard was a North …

Crossett (Ashley County)

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the demand for wood fiber for a growing country led lumbermen, investors, and speculators into the vast forest that stretches from east Texas across the lower Mississippi River Valley to the Florida panhandle. Demand having outstripped the forest resources of the Great Lakes region, other sources for timber were sought. One result of the interest in the forestland of the South was the founding of Crossett (Ashley County). Crossett was founded in the late 1890s by three investors from Davenport, Iowa— Edward Savage Crossett, Austria native Dr. John Wenzel Watzek, and Charles Warner Gates. Today, Crossett is one of the state’s leading manufacturing centers, billing itself as the “Forestry Capital of the …