Washington Courthouse to Fayetteville

The George McGarrah family arrived in eighteen twenty-eight and set up their homestead at a spring, at the base of the hill settlers called Mount Sequoyah. Washington County was formally established on October seventeenth of that year, carved from a tract called Lovely County, itself a piece of territory that had recently been negotiated away from the Osage and Cherokee. The new county seat was first named Washington Courthouse.

It did not hold that name long. In eighteen twenty-nine, Postmaster General William T. Barry ordered the name changed.

There was already a town called Washington in Hempstead County, farther south, and the confusion in the postal routes was a real and practical nuisance. The new name was borrowed from Fayetteville, Tennessee, and traces back through Fayetteville, North Carolina, to the Marquis de Lafayette, the French general who had fought alongside George Washington. Within a decade, Fayetteville had a courthouse, a newspaper, several taverns, and a position as the commercial hub of northwest Arkansas.

It sat at the intersection of roads reaching east toward the Mississippi, south toward Fort Smith, and north toward Missouri. Geography made it important. The spring that drew the McGarrahs became the spring that drew a town, and a town that became the anchor of a corner of Arkansas that would prove, over the following two centuries, more consequential than anyone in eighteen twenty-eight could have imagined.