Hope, Arkansas: A Railroad Town Named for a Director's Daughter

Hope, Arkansas, wasn’t named for a feeling but for a person, Miss Hope Loughborough, whose father sat on the board of the railroad that laid out the town.

A town with no houses yet

The Goodspeed history of southern Arkansas, published in 1890, has the details. The town was “laid out in July, 1873, by Chief Engineer Morley, of the Cairo & Fulton Railroad,” on the south end of Prairie De Roan, and lots went on sale the next month. When the surveyors staked it out, “there was not a house standing within the radius of its present corporate limits.”

The new town, the book says, “was named Hope, in honor of Miss Hope Loughborrough, a daughter of Maj. Loughborrough, a director of the Cairo & Fulton Railroad.” That’s the whole story in one sentence, and the other sources line up behind it. Henry Gannett’s federal place-name book of 1905 says Hope was “named for the daughter of J. M. Loughborough,” and the federal place-names database repeats that line word for word.

Same Hope, slightly different paperwork

You’ll see small differences depending on which book you open. Goodspeed spells the family name with a double r and calls her father “Maj.” The Centennial History of Arkansas, edited by Dallas T. Herndon in 1922, spells it Loughborough and calls him “one of the directors of that railroad company.” The two books even disagree by a few days on when Hope became a city: Goodspeed says March 20, 1875, and Herndon says March 25. Either way, it took less than two years to go from a site with no houses to an incorporated city.

Who was J. M. Loughborough?

Gannett gives only the initials. Fay Hempstead’s Pictorial History of Arkansas (1890) has a sketch of a James M. Loughborough who moved to Little Rock from St. Louis in 1871 as general land agent of the St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern Railway. Hempstead calls him Colonel, says he served in the state Senate from 1874 to 1876, and says the state’s “Loughborough bonds” were named for him. He died in Little Rock on July 31, 1876.

Here’s the odd part. Hempstead lists his four children living in 1890: daughters Jean M. W. and Pansy, and sons James Fairfax and St. James. There’s no Hope on the list. None of these books explains why, and none of them actually says Hempstead’s James M. is the father of the Hope the town was named for, though the initials match and both men worked for railroads. It’s a loose end you can’t tie off with these old books alone.

Sources & further reading

• Goodspeed, Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Southern Arkansas (1890), Hempstead County, p. 385. Laid out in July 1873 by Chief Engineer Morley of the Cairo & Fulton, no houses on the site, and the name “in honor of Miss Hope Loughborrough.”
• Dallas T. Herndon, ed., Centennial History of Arkansas, vol. 1 (1922), pp. 879–880. Miss Hope Loughborough, “whose father was one of the directors of that railroad company,” and the 1875 incorporation.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). “Named for the daughter of J. M. Loughborough.”
• Fay Hempstead, A Pictorial History of Arkansas (1890), pp. 811–812. The sketch of James M. Loughborough: land agent for the Iron Mountain railroad, state senator, the Loughborough bonds, his death in 1876 and his children.
• GNIS feature 57940 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record: “Named for the daughter of J. M. Loughborough.”