Morrilton, Arkansas, The Town That Followed the Railroad
Arkansas
The town you are passing near, Morrilton, is one of those places that literally got up and moved. And that is not a metaphor.
The original settlement in this part of the Arkansas River valley was called Lewisburg. Stephen Lewis founded it in eighteen nineteen at the mouth of Point Remove Creek, where the creek meets the Arkansas River. For fifty years Lewisburg thrived as a river port, serving flatboats and steamboats that hauled cotton and corn along the river corridor. It was a real town, with a courthouse, churches, and commerce tied to the water.
Then the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad laid its tracks one mile to the north. The railroad men surveyed their line, acquired land from a local farmer named E.J. Morrill, and built a depot on his property. They named the depot stop Morrilton. Almost overnight, the economic gravity of the region shifted. One by one, businesses and residents in Lewisburg packed up and relocated to be near the tracks. By eighteen eighty, Lewisburg had been abandoned entirely. Morrilton became the county seat of Conway County in eighteen eighty-three.
The county itself was named for Henry Wharton Conway, an early Arkansas territorial delegate who died in a duel at the age of thirty-four, which tells you something about the flavor of Arkansas politics in the eighteen twenties.
A century later, Morrilton would get a different kind of famous neighbor. In nineteen fifty-three, Winthrop Rockefeller, grandson of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, arrived in Arkansas and purchased land on nearby Petit Jean Mountain. He named it Winrock Farms and turned it into a showcase for modern, progressive agriculture, breeding Santa Gertrudis cattle and inviting small farmers from across the state to learn new techniques. Rockefeller would later serve two terms as governor of Arkansas, from nineteen sixty-seven to nineteen seventy-one, and the farm he built above Morrilton became the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute, still operating today as a center for policy and community development.
The river town that vanished left a railroad town that reinvented itself, and the Rockefeller legacy gave this stretch of the Arkansas River valley its last great chapter.
