Founding of Benton County
Near Fayetteville, Arkansas
Benton County was born just months before Arkansas itself became a state. The legislature carved it out on September thirtieth, eighteen thirty-six, naming it for Thomas Hart Benton, the powerful United States Senator from Missouri who had championed Arkansas statehood. A three-man commission was sent to pick a county seat.
They settled on a little settlement called Osage and renamed it Bentonville, also in the Senator's honor. In November of eighteen thirty-seven they laid out a courthouse square and one hundred thirty-six town lots in the middle of the new county. A jail went up by eighteen thirty-seven and the first courthouse was in use by May of eighteen thirty-eight.
From those frontier beginnings, Bentonville would one day become the headquarters of the world's largest retailer. But it started here, as a square of stakes in the grass named for a Missouri politician who never lived in Arkansas.
