Pope County is a county in the U.S. state of Arkansas. As of the 2020 census, the population was 63,381. The county seat is Russellville. The county was formed on November 2, 1829, from a portion of Crawford County and named for John Pope, the third governor of the Arkansas Territory. Pope County was the nineteenth (of seventy-five) county formed. The county's borders changed eighteen times in the 19th century with the creation of new counties and adjustments between counties. The current boundaries were set on March 8, 1877.
Pope County is geographically diverse, with the Arkansas River Valley and its farmlands and towns in the southern portion and the Ozarks covering nearly two-thirds of the county to the north, including a portion of the rugged Boston Mountains, a deeply dissected plateau. Approximately 40% of the county is in the Ozark National Forest.
Pope County is an alcohol prohibition or dry county.
Pope County is part of the Russellville, Arkansas, Micropolitan Statistical Area which encompasses all of Pope and Yell County.
History
Louisiana Purchase and Cherokee Lands In 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte sold French Louisiana to the United States, including all of Arkansas. Today, that transaction is known as the Louisiana Purchase.
By 1804, President Jefferson, with others, looked to the new lands as a refuge for Indian peoples on lands near American settlements, keeping American settlers and Indian societies separate.
Soon after the Louisiana Purchase, much of the region encompassing future Pope and other counties was designated as lands for the removal of eastern native tribes. In about 1805, Cherokee living in southeast Missouri on the Mississippi River moved to the Arkansas River at the suggestion of Louisiana Territory Governor James Wilkinson. After the New Madrid earthquakes, most of the Cherokee—as many as 2,000 people—who had lived along the St. Francis River relocated to the Arkansas River Valley.
In 1815, the US government established a Cherokee Reservation in the Arkansas district of the Missouri Territory and sought to persuade the Cherokee to relocate there voluntarily. The reservation boundaries extended from north of the Arkansas River to the southern bank of the White River. The Cherokee who moved to this reservation became known as the "Old Settlers" or Western Cherokee.
A village on the Illinois Bayou served as the capital of the Western Cherokees from 1813 to 1824.
The Treaty of 1817 secured lands in Arkansas for the Western Cherokees north of the Arkansas River between Point Remove and Fort Smith and removed all citizens of the United States, except Persis Lovely, the widow of Indian Agenet William Lovely. Most white settlers moved to new locations south of the river. By 1820, new Cherokee emigrants from the east had blended with the Old Settlers in a new "colony" with a string of Cherokee villages stretching for over 70 miles above Point Remove. About half of this distance was in the future Pope County. An 1820 description by Territorial Governor James Miller called it a "lovely, rich part of the country".
In 1818, the chief of the Arkansas Cherokees, Tol-on-tus-ky (Tolunskee or Tollontiskee), requested that the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions send a mission to Arkansas. The assignment was given to Cephas Washburn and his brother-in-law, Alfred Finney, who established a mission in 1820 on the west side of Illinois Bayou about four miles from the Arkansas River. The stream was navigable for keelboats about nine months of the year. The mission was named Dwight for the late Rev. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College and a corporate member of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The site was on a gentle rise covered with a growth of oak and pine at the foot of which issued a large spring of pure water. Above, below, and opposite the site was plenty of excellent bottomland for cultivation. The mission was conveniently near Indian villages. The mission eventually included more than 25 buildings, including seven log cabins, a dining hall, library, post office, lumber house, carpenter shop, saw mill, meat house, grist mill, and barn. The land where Dwight Mission buildings were is now under the waters of Lake Dardanelle, but the cemetery is still on the hill nearby.
By the time the Arkansas Territory was established in 1819, the western Cherokees represented at least 20 percent of the Territory's total population, mostly centered along the Arkansas River and in the future Pope County.
Arkansas Territory Beginning in the 1820s, an increasing number of settlers came to Arkansas from southern states, creating an environment for the eastern Indians who had moved there that was similar to the one from which they had been expelled. Under a new treaty concluded on May 6, 1828, the western boundary of Arkansas was established with seven million acres to the west of that provided to the Cherokees "forever". The Cherokees agreed to leave the Arkansas lands within 14 months. In 1829, all of the people at Dwight Mission moved to the new Indian Territory—in present-day Oklahoma—, where Dwight Mission was re-established in a new location.
Pope County was established on November 2, 1829, ten years after the establishment of the Territory of Arkansas, with a temporary county seat to be at the home of John Bollinger. (Note 1: The act actually took effect on December 25, though John Pope approved it on November 2. Virtually all references give November 2 for the day that Pope County was established.) (Note 2: John Bollinger was one of 13 county magistrates appointed November 20, 1829.) A county seat selection commission elected in January 1830 chose the community of Scotia, home of Judge Andrew Scott, a neighbor of Bollinger, as the permanent county seat. With the formation of Johnson County in 1833, Scotia was but half a mile from the county line. The county seat was moved to Dwight and, then, in 1834, to Norristown, a growing town of the Arkansas River upstream and across the river from Dardanelle.
Transportation into Arkansas' interior in the early years was mostly limited to river travel. While navigable, the Arkansas River was unpredictable, alternating between floods and droughts and infested with sandbars and snags. The winding Arkansas River passed through a vast swampy floodplain that covered much of eastern Arkansas, a breeding ground for malaria-bearing mosquitoes. Settlers in those areas soon suffered from malarial fevers and other ailments, and Arkansas gained a reputation as a sick and swampy land. Most pioneers avoided Arkansas and chose other destinations to settle in. Those who ventured further—into central and western parts of the territory, and Pope County—found good soils along the river valley and, in the mountains, healthy forests of pine, oaks, and hickory, with well-drained soils for farming in the valleys, a wealth of forage for grazing, and an abundance of game animals. At the end of the territorial years, the bulk of the people of Pope County were plain-folk farmers, herders, and hunters.
Antebellum Pope County When Yell County was established on December 5, 1840, the county seat was again on the periphery of the county. In 1841, commissioners moved the county seat to Dover, a more central location, after selecting it for that purpose. The first courthouse was a log structure.
With the outbreak of war with Mexico, in July 1846, a company of mounted infantry volunteers from Pope County, organized under Captain David West, along with volunteer units from other counties, entered service in the Indian Territory, replacing regular Army troops that had been dispatched to Mexico. The Arkansas volunteer troops provided an essential Federal military presence along the state's western border and eastern portion of the Indian Territory during a period of violent disputes between factions in the Cherokee Nation. After the arrival of three companies of regular Army dragoon recruits, the Pope County volunteers returned home in late April 1847.
There were 695 white families in Pope County in 1850. The total population, according to the census, was 4,710; 10.2% were slaves (479 Individuals). Only 1,640 individuals had been born in Arkansas. Most of the rest had been born in southern slave states. There were 11 who were foreign-born, including Dr. Thomas Russell. Sixty-two percent of the white population was under 15 years old. Twenty-three individuals were seventy or older; just two had made it to eighty. Over eighty percent of the population was supported by agriculture, mostly by self-sufficient farm families. Other occupations included carpentry, blacksmithing, tanning, lumbering, merchandising, and wagon-making. There were some lawyers, teachers, doctors, and preachers as well as millers, saddlers, shoemakers, cabinet-makers, county officials, and at least one tar kiln operator. There were 100 slaveowners, and ten owned ten or more slaves. Three farmers had twenty or more slaves, enough to be considered "planters" in the slave culture of the South. There were no free blacks documented. There were thirteen sawmills—two steam-powered and the rest powered by water—, two tanneries, and a cotton factory producing 22,500 pounds of thread annually. Dr. Thomas Russell, for whom Russellville was named, owned 680 acres of land, four slaves, a store, and ten town lots. There were eleven one-teacher subscription schools with a total enrollment of 326 students. Churches totaled ten, according to the census, with 6 Methodist, 2 Baptist, 1 Cumberland Presbyterian, and 1 Old School Presbyterian. Principal causes of death, were, in order, croup, winter fever, cholera, hives, diarrhea, consumption and accidents. More than half of all deaths were infants under one year of age, and only nine percent were over forty.
Dover, the county seat, was the most important town between Little Rock and Fort Smith in 1850. Galla Rock, south of present-day Atkins, and Norristown were important trading centers with goods transported on the Arkansas River.
In the late 1850s, Edward Payson Washburn took inspiration from Pope County scenes near the family's Norristown home for his most famous work, The Arkansas Traveler, the composition of which was derived from a story he heard from Colonel Sandford C. Faulkner. Supposedly occurring on the campaign trail in Arkansas in 1840, Colonel Faulkner's humorous story ends with a fiddle-playing squatter being won over by the traveler (man on horse in image). Washburn's father was Cephas Washburn, founder of Dwight Mission.
While the majority of the population of Pope County consisted of rural families, many were squatters on state or federal land. In 1851, about 76% of households did not own land and, in 1860, some 66% did not.
In 1860, though its population had grown by 67.4% in a decade, Pope County was still sparsely settled. The slave population had grown to 12.4% (978 individuals). Along with the rest of Arkansas, it was on an economic frontier attracting relatively large numbers of new settlers, mostly from other southern states. Even though Arkansas had been a state since 1836, the few communities were small with limited development. The population in the 1860 census included 6,905 whites. There were 978 slaves, mostly in the agricultural areas in the southern part of the county. Most families were in the southern lowlands of the county. A railroad being developed to be built through the county—the Little Rock & Fort Smith—was to include a depot in Dover.
Civil War