Fargo, Arkansas

Fargo in Monroe County, Arkansas, owes its existence to one man's ambition. Leroy Washington Mahon migrated from South Carolina, built a farm in the flat Delta bottomland, and when the Cotton Belt Railroad came through, the town was platted on his land in nineteen eleven. A railroad conductor suggested the name Fargo, reportedly on a whim.

Mahon, an African American landowner in the post-Reconstruction South, became the founding figure of a community that soon drew an educator named Floyd Brown, a Tuskegee Institute graduate who founded the Fargo Agricultural School in nineteen twenty, a school modeled on Booker T. Washington's methods. The post office had opened in eighteen ninety-eight, thirteen years before the formal platting, making Fargo one of those small Delta towns where the mail arrived before the streets did.