Fulton: A Tiny Town That Honored the Steam Age

Fulton, Arkansas sits near the Red River in Hempstead County with a population of barely more than one hundred people today. The town was named for Robert Fulton, the inventor whose steam-powered Clermont made its first successful voyage up the Hudson River in eighteen oh seven, proving that mechanical propulsion could replace oar and sail on American waterways. Fulton did not invent the steamboat, but he made it commercially viable, and the rivers of the South, including the Red River below this town, became the highways of an entire economy as a result.

By the time Arkansas towns like this one were being settled and named in the mid-eighteen hundreds, Fulton was a cultural hero of the age of progress. The name stuck even as the steam era ended.