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Section 6 of 6 · 5 entries
The towns
Street grids drawn by a company, kept after the work went.
The towns south and west of Fort Smith were sited by mines and sidings rather than by any older geography. Some were county seats that used the coal economy without depending on it; others were platted by operators to house a workforce. The grids stayed when the work stopped, and they still explain what each place was for.
Everything in the towns
Hartford and Huntington, Two Grids
Two mining towns close together, with the street pattern the companies laid out.
Barling and Lavaca
Bonanza and Jenny Lind
Two small communities that took their names from the gold-rush vocabulary of mid-century optimism and never grew into them.
Greenwood
The Sebastian County seat sits at the edge of the coalfield, built on extraction, and still there when extraction stopped.
Mansfield and Midland
Two coal towns whose street plans still carry the signature of the companies that built them.