Visitors Guide to Craighead County, Arkansas

Craighead County is one of the many Arkansas counties that Crowley’s Ridge traverses. Crowley’s Ridge is a unique geological feature that stands 100 to 200 feet above the fertile flood plains of the Delta and runs for 150 miles in eastern Arkansas and southeastern Missouri. In a sense it is the western bluffs of the Mississippi River as the river’s course continuously changes over the eons, but never farther west than Crowley’s Ridge. Native Americans who inhabited the region lived both on the highlands of the ridge as well as the surrounding lowlands. Beginning in the mid-1500s, European explorers, starting with Hernando de Soto, came to northeast Arkansas and Crowley’s Ridge. The land, however, wasn’t settled by Europeans until the 1820s. Most of the early settlers to Craighead County obtained their land from warrants given to them for service in the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War. In 1850, the U.S. Congress granted the state of Arkansas all swamp and overflow lands, much of which were in the region now included in Craighead County. The state sold this land to pay for programs that created levees and drained the swamplands. Due to the regular flooding of the surrounding lowlands, the Crowley’s Ridge was where most people preferred to live. The first real community in the county was Greensboro, located about eleven miles northeast of the present Jonesboro. It was settled in 1835 when a settler named Joe Willey cleared a town site and erected the county’s first gristmill.

During the 1850s, a candidate for the state legislature, William Jones, made a campaign pledge to voters residing in the northern section of Poinsett County to use his influence to create a new county. After being elected, he proposed, in the 1858 legislative session, the creation of a new county in northeast Arkansas. “Crowley County” was originally proposed as the name of the new county. The proposal called for the new county to incorporate land from the area represented by Jones’s fellow state senator, Thomas Craighead, who strongly opposed the idea. At a time when Craighead was allegedly absent from the Senate chamber (though some historians dispute this based on legislative records), the vote was taken, and the bill to create the new county was passed. The victorious Jones proposed that the county be named for Craighead - some say as a joke, others say as a gesture of goodwill. Craighead in turn proposed that the new county seat would be named for Jones, though some sources say it was named for Jones by its grateful citizens. A local farmer donated fifteen acres of his land on the widest stretch of Crowley’s Ridge for a town site in the area that is now downtown Jonesboro.

Following Arkansas’s secession from the Union in May 1861, several Confederate infantry companies were organized in Craighead County, though its population consisted mainly of small farmers and businessmen, not slaveholders on large plantations. The only reported military action fought in Craighead County was an 1862 skirmish at Jonesboro in which several Union soldiers were killed along with an unreported number of Confederates. Bands of bushwhackers were known to terrorize the county. The postwar Reconstruction was as harsh in Craighead County as it was in most other places throughout the defeated South. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) organized in the county with the ostensible goal of protecting property rights. Craighead County was one of the counties that Governor Powell Clayton placed under martial law. In November 1868, he sent the state militia to Craighead County to clean out its Klan activity, much of which was centered on Greensboro.

A number of courthouse fires in Jonesboro destroyed many of the county’s early documents. The original Craighead County Courthouse was a two-story frame building which burned down in 1869. In 1878 another fire destroyed another wooden courthouse and its records, along with eight other businesses in Jonesboro. A third wooden courthouse burned down in 1885, again with many other downtown buildings around the square. In 1886, a new courthouse was completed, this time made of brick and standing two stories tall. This building stood until 1934 when it was torn down to make room for the present courthouse, which was dedicated in 1935. An American Doughboy monument to World War I, the first World War I monument built in the south, and one of the first to be erected in America is located on the grounds of the courthouse and was unveiled on Memorial Day in 1920. As the city of Jonesboro grew, it absorbed many former independent townships in the county including Nettleton, Valley View, and Westside.

Huge forests were located in Craighead County. Along Crowley’s Ridge these forests consisted of oak, poplar, gum, pine, hickory, ash, and maple. In the lowlands, oak trees, cottonwood, cypress, hickory, and tupelo were abundant. The richness and variety of trees to be found in the county gave rise to a thriving lumber and woodworking industry in the late 1800s. The logs were for the most part hauled from the rural areas of the county to Jonesboro, where the lumber was processed and sent to market. One of the most significant events in the county’s history occurred in 1882 when the Cotton Belt railroad came through Jonesboro, bringing in people, goods, and building supplies and carrying lumber from the county’s timber industry to the rest of the nation. The forests can still be enjoyed by visiting Lake Frierson State Park, Craighead Forest Park, and Crowley’s Ridge Nature Center. The St. Francis Levee District was created on March 21, 1893. Prior to this time, the flood-prone Mississippi and St. Francis rivers often covered the eastern portion of the county. The levee district has made the agricultural production of corn, cotton, potatoes, hay, and grains.

Jonesboro also became the site of higher education institutions in Northeast Arkansas. In 1904, Woodland College was founded in Jonesboro, though it was forced to close after a few years for financial reasons, as did Jonesboro Baptist College, which was established in 1924. In 1909, the Arkansas legislature passed a law providing for state public schools of agriculture in each of the state’s four districts. Jonesboro was selected for one and eventually became Arkansas State University. The Arkansas State University Museum and the Bradbury Gallery are attractions that ASU offers to visitors to Jonesboro.

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