Clarksville, Arkansas, The Oldest University West of the Mississippi

Clarksville, Arkansas, the county seat of Johnson County, sits in the upper Arkansas River valley where the Ozark highlands begin to press down toward the flood plain. It was settled in the eighteen thirties, and Johnson County was formally established in eighteen thirty-three, named for Benjamin Johnson, one of the territorial judges who helped shape early Arkansas law.

The town would have remained a quiet agricultural market had it not inherited something remarkable: the oldest university west of the Mississippi River.

The institution now called the University of the Ozarks traces its roots to eighteen thirty-four, when Cumberland Presbyterians established a school called Cane Hill College in Washington County, Arkansas. For more than fifty years Cane Hill College operated in the Boston Mountains. Then, in eighteen ninety-one, the college ran out of financial steam, and its trustees faced a choice. They could close, or they could move. They moved to Clarksville.

The newly relocated school opened on September eighth, eighteen ninety-one, as Arkansas Cumberland College. Two hundred seventeen students enrolled that first semester. The Cumberland Presbyterians later merged with the main body of the Presbyterian Church, and the college changed its name to the College of the Ozarks in nineteen twenty-one. It became the University of the Ozarks in more recent decades.

The result is a small liberal arts college, roughly nine hundred students today, with a lineage older than Arkansas statehood. Arkansas did not enter the Union until eighteen thirty-six, two years after Cane Hill opened its doors. That layering of frontier education onto frontier territory is part of what makes the Ozark highlands feel different from the rest of the state. People came here early, stayed through hardship, and built institutions that outlasted the circumstances that created them.

Clarksville today is a college town and agricultural hub, known locally for its grapes and, more recently, for chicken processing operations that have brought large immigrant communities into the river valley.