Jacksonville, Arkansas
Near Little Rock, Arkansas
Jacksonville, just northeast of Little Rock in Pulaski County, began as a railroad gift. In eighteen seventy, a local landowner and mule dealer named Nicholas W. Jackson offered his property as the site for a Cairo and Fulton Railroad depot.
The line accepted, the depot went in, and the new stop was named for the man who donated the ground. The town grew quietly for eighty years. Then in nineteen fifty-one, civic leaders launched a campaign to bring the United States Air Force to central Arkansas.
They raised private funds, purchased six thousand acres north of town, and handed the land to the government. Little Rock Air Force Base opened in nineteen fifty-five and transformed Jacksonville almost overnight, anchoring the city's economy and pushing its population into the tens of thousands.
