Benton: Named for the Senator Who Fought the Bank
Near Little Rock, Arkansas
Benton is the county seat of Saline County, Arkansas, first settled in eighteen thirty-three and formally chartered in eighteen thirty-six when Arkansas became a state. It was named for Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, one of the most forceful voices in early American politics. Benton served thirty years in the Senate, longer than anyone before him at the time, championing westward expansion and free land for settlers.
He fought Andrew Jackson's war on the Second Bank of the United States and later broke with his own party over the expansion of slavery. Today Benton is a growing suburb of Little Rock with over thirty-five thousand residents, but its name still carries a piece of the Jacksonian era, when a senator from Missouri could shape the entire direction of a young nation.
