There are Arkansas place names that sound as if somebody made them up simply because they needed something to put on a map: Fifty-Six, Possum Grape, Toad Suck, Oil Trough, Nogo.

Then there is Lost Corner.

Unlike some of those names, Lost Corner almost explains itself.

The little community lies in northern Pope County, northeast of Hector and close to the Van Buren County line, on high ground between the South Fork of the Little Red River to the east and the Illinois Bayou drainage to the west. Even today, it is not the sort of place one reaches by accident. In the early twentieth century, when mountain roads could be little more than wagon tracks, it really was a corner of Arkansas that could seem remarkably far removed from the rest of the state.

For a brief period during the Great Depression, Lost Corner became nationally known precisely because of its isolation.

Before It Was Lost Corner

The community did not begin with that name.

Its earliest history is poorly documented, which is not unusual for a scattered mountain settlement whose important institutions were farms, schools, churches, stores, and family networks rather than a courthouse or city government.

At one time, the area apparently was known as Old Diamond. Later it became Okay.

The Okay post office was established in 1904. The name presented a problem, however: Arkansas already had another Okay, in Howard County. According to the surviving account, Postmaster George Napier eventually submitted three alternative names to the Post Office Department.

The government selected Lost Corner.

In 1929, Okay officially became Lost Corner.

The name was unusually appropriate. [continue reading…]

There are larger rivers in Arkansas. Some carried more commerce, powered more industry, and played a larger role in the state’s settlement.

But there is nothing quite like the Buffalo.

Running through some of the roughest country in the Arkansas Ozarks, the Buffalo River winds beneath towering limestone and sandstone bluffs, past abandoned farms and old mining settlements, through deep forest and isolated valleys, and eventually into the White River.

For most of its existence, nobody considered it a national treasure.

It was simply the river.

Families lived beside it. They planted corn in its bottoms, raised livestock on its hillsides, cut timber from the surrounding forests, dug zinc and lead from the mountains, fished its pools, crossed it on horseback and in wagons, and sometimes watched helplessly as floods swept away what they had built.

Then, in the twentieth century, Americans began to see rivers differently. [continue reading…]

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