Arkansas Town Names: The Accidental Poetry of a Frontier State

Arkansas has a town called Toad Suck. There is a Yellville and a Flippin, a Smackover and a Bald Knob. There is a town called Okay and a settlement known as Greasy Corner, a Pickle Gap in the Ozarks and Possum Grape in White County. The names accumulated the way frontier naming always did: from creek features and landowners, from early settler jokes that outlasted the settlers, from corrupted Indigenous place names that stripped away their original meaning and left only the sound, from surveyors who had been on the road too long and ran out of gravity, from political disputes that named a county seat after whoever won.

Arkansas has not cleaned up its names. Most states, in the twentieth century, quietly retired the more embarrassing place names through administrative renaming. Arkansas largely did not bother. The result is a naming landscape that functions as a kind of accidental oral history of the state's settlement period, a record of what people thought was funny, what they thought mattered, and what they could get the post office to accept.

Toad Suck has a festival. It involves catfish and funnel cake and a considerable amount of good-natured commerce in the name itself. The town of Okay is down in the Arkansas River valley, near the Oklahoma state line. There is no documentation in the accessible record of who named it or why. The name suggests someone had run out of enthusiasm for the project but was still willing to commit.