What the Spring Started

There is a spring at the base of the hill called Mount Sequoyah, at what is now the corner of Spring Street and Willow Avenue in Fayetteville. It is not a dramatic feature of the landscape, just a reliable source of cold water at the foot of a ridge, the kind of thing that determined where people stopped and stayed in the era before municipal water systems. The George McGarrah family stopped there in eighteen twenty-eight.

Their spring became the nucleus of a county seat. The county seat became the site of a university. The university produced generations of lawyers, engineers, and business graduates who built companies or ran for office or stayed and built a community.

The cheap rents around that university fed a music scene that became one of the most distinctive in the South. The music scene helped make the city attractive to young people, and young people helped make the city attractive to growth. A few miles north, Sam Walton was running his stores.

A few miles to the north, John Tyson was vertically integrating chicken. In a brick house near the law school, two ambitious young professors were working out the early chapters of careers that would lead to the White House. All of it traces, at some distance, back to geography.

A plateau. A series of roads that crossed it. A spring at the base of a hill where someone decided to stop.

Most cities begin with something like that, a specific, ordinary, practical reason to stay put. The story grows from there.