The Mountain Railroad That Made It Possible
Near Eureka Springs, Arkansas
In the first years after the spring rush of eighteen seventy-nine, getting to Eureka Springs meant a long and uncomfortable wagon ride through the Ozark hills. The railroad changed that. The Eureka Springs Railway was chartered in eighteen eighty-two, and by eighteen eighty-three the first trains were running into town from the main rail network at Seligman, Missouri to the north.
The railroad made Eureka Springs genuinely accessible to visitors from Kansas City, Saint Louis, and beyond, and the boom years deepened as a result. Fashionable hotels went up, bathhouses multiplied, and the town took on the brick permanence that defines it today. The line changed ownership several times over the following decades.
It survives today as the Eureka Springs and North Arkansas Railway, a heritage railroad that runs excursion trains on a short stretch of the original route. The steam and diesel locomotives that pull tourists through the Ozark woods now are different from the ones that first climbed these hills carrying the sick and the hopeful, but the experience of arriving in Eureka Springs by rail, the hillsides rising on both sides as the train curves through the forest, preserves something of the original journey.
