Lonoke: The Town Named After a Tree

According to local legend, when a railroad engineer surveying this stretch arrived at this spot on the Arkansas prairie, he found exactly one landmark worth noting: a solitary red oak tree standing alone on the flat land.

The planned depot was named Lone Oak after it, and a newspaper misprint eventually turned that into Lonoke.

The town incorporated in eighteen seventy-two and later became the seat of Lonoke County. That original lone oak is long gone, but the county it inadvertently named remains, and the town of about four thousand people still carries the peculiar legacy of one railroad engineer, one tree, and a series of spelling errors.