Crawford County was 194 years old yesterday. While it might be eclipsed by Fort Smith, its much larger neighbor to the south across the Arkansas River, Crawford County and Van Buren, its county seat, were seedbeds of early Arkansas history.
The key to Crawford County's early history and development was its location on the Arkansas River, the means by which steamboats could penetrate the full width of Arkansas. Later, this same location meant that both Van Buren and nearby Alma benefited greatly when the railroad snaked its way up the Arkansas River Valley in the early 1870s.
Created by the first territorial legislature on Oct. 18, 1820, the original Crawford County stretched across much of northwest Arkansas and extended far into modern Oklahoma. (Imagine how different Arkansas would be today if its western half had not been turned into Indian lands.) The county was named in honor of William H. Crawford of Georgia, then the U.S. treasury secretary.
Settlement was slow in coming to Crawford County in the early years, in part because much of the land was part of the Cherokee reservation until 1828. The rugged terrain covering much of Crawford County was another hindrance. However, as early as 1814 a settler (or perhaps a land speculator) named Thomas Martin had claimed the land on which the city of Van Buren would later be built. Martin quickly sold his holdings to the recently arrived Phillips family, which established the first business in the area--a boat dock and fuel yard for steamboats. Van Buren, which evolved over time and eventually became the county seat, was named for President Martin Van Buren.
For a time, the Van Buren and Fort Smith area competed with St. Louis to become the jumping-off point for western migration. Josiah Gregg, widely known for his pioneering trade with the Mexicans at Santa Fe, moved to Van Buren around 1838. Van Buren also benefited economically from the travel boom resulting from the California gold rush of 1849.
Telegraph lines reached Crawford County in 1856, and the Butterfield Overland Mail stagecoach arrived two years later. Two newspapers, including the Arkansas Intelligencer, served the area before the Civil War.
In 1851 the U.S. government established a Federal District Court for the western half of Arkansas, with the courts located in Van Buren. After two decades, the court moved to Fort Smith where it would earn national fame, or perhaps infamy, as the court of "Hanging Judge" Isaac C. Parker.
Jesse Turner, one of the most outstanding attorneys of early Arkansas, lived in Van Buren. A North Carolinian by birth, Turner moved to Arkansas in 1831 to try his hand at lawyering on the western frontier. Turner, an ardent Whig, was politically active throughout his long life, including serving in the legislature and as a unionist delegate to the 1861 convention to consider joining the Confederacy. Like so many of the early Whig leaders in Arkansas, Turner was well-read, and he had wide-ranging interests. As far as I know, Turner was the first Arkansan to write a brief history of the state, which he gave at the great Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876.
The Civil War was rough on Crawford County. Transient armies on both sides picked the area clean of foodstuffs and forage, and Van Buren came under bombardment by Confederate artillery forces during their evacuation of the area in late December 1862 following the Union victory at Prairie Grove. Urban bombardment was rare in Civil War Arkansas.
The arrival of the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad in 1879 contributed significantly to the local population and economy. The availability of rapid rail shipment was a boon to the growing vegetable and fruit industries in the rich bottomlands near the Arkansas River.
The village of Alma emerged after the Civil War to serve the growing agricultural area east of Van Buren. In addition to the standby crops of cotton and corn, strawberry farming became popular. But it was spinach that put Alma on the map. A statue of Popeye the Sailor proudly proclaimed Alma as the "spinach capital of America."
Nearby Mulberry, in the eastern part of Crawford County, is home to a 32,000-foot plant to process locally-grown edamame. As the only plant of its kind in the nation, it caused Mulberry to be dubbed "the future edamame capitol of America."
During the first half of the 20th Century, Van Buren was widely known as the home of entertainer Bob Burns and his bizarre musical instrument called the "bazooka." Unfortunately for Alma, it was home to the various nefarious businesses of cult preacher Tony Alamo before he relocated to Miller County in 1998. Mountainburg, located in the ruggedly beautiful mountains of northern Crawford County, is widely respected as a speed trap.
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Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living nearly Glen Rose in rural Hot Spring County. Email him at Arktopia.td@gmail.com.
Editorial on 10/19/2014