Carlisle, Arkansas

Carlisle is a small city on the Arkansas Grand Prairie, platted by Samuel McCormick and his wife in August of eighteen seventy-two along the route of the Memphis and Little Rock Railroad, which had been running through the area since eighteen fifty-eight. McCormick named the town either for his former home of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, or for a senator he admired, accounts differ. The town was incorporated in eighteen seventy-eight.

What the early settlers found here was rich prairie grassland, and by eighteen seventy-nine they were shipping native grasses by rail to other states as livestock feed. Over the following decades the Grand Prairie around Carlisle became major rice-farming country, an identity the region still holds, making it part of the unlikely story of large-scale rice agriculture in the middle of Arkansas.