What Was Here Before: Maumelle
Near Little Rock, Arkansas
The Arkansas River bottomlands here have been inhabited since at least four hundred years before the common era. Osage people claimed the wooded bluffs north of the river as hunting territory. Hernando de Soto passed through in fifteen forty-one searching for gold. The first European settlers arrived in eighteen twelve, when the Pyeatt brothers established a homestead and river ferry at a bend the French had long called Maumelle, a word meaning breast-shaped hill.
For a century and a half the land stayed agricultural, a quiet river corridor ten miles from Little Rock. Then in nineteen sixty-seven, Arkansas insurance executive Jesse Odom bought five thousand acres and had a grander vision. With forty-five million dollars in federal assistance from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, he set out to build one of only thirteen federally designated New Towns in the United States, a planned community designed from scratch with industrial parks, parks, healthcare, and housing for all incomes. The first family moved in in nineteen seventy-four. The federal New Town program eventually collapsed nationwide, but Maumelle kept building on its own terms. It is now Arkansas's wealthiest city by median household income, still following the grid laid out on what was once a hunting ground and a river crossing.
