Beebe: The Railroad Man's Town

Beebe, Arkansas, owes its name to Roswell Beebe, a railroad executive who surveyed and promoted the St. Louis, Iron Mountain, and Southern line through White County in the early eighteen seventies. The depot went in around eighteen seventy-two, the post office followed, and thirty-two residents petitioned the state to incorporate the town in eighteen seventy-five.

What grew around that depot became an agricultural trading center for the fertile central Arkansas plain. The larger legacy arrived in nineteen twenty-seven, when State Senator William Abington shepherded legislation to establish a junior agricultural school here. That school became Arkansas State University at Beebe, today a two-year college, still educating students in the county the railroad put on the map.