Little Rock, Arkansas: The Small Rock That Named a Capital

By 1911, the rock that gave Little Rock, Arkansas, its name was holding up the end of a railroad bridge. French explorers had named it a little rock, to set it apart from a much bigger bluff a couple of miles up the river.

Two rocks on the Arkansas

Dallas T. Herndon’s Centennial History of Arkansas (1922) gives the credit to Bernard de la Harpe, the French explorer who went up the Arkansas River in 1722. He “noticed the outcrop of stone on the bank of the river, where the city now stands, and gave it the name of La Petite Roche (Little Rock), to distinguish it from the larger rocky bluff (now called Big Rock) two miles farther up the river.” Earlier in the same book, Herndon has La Harpe camping a night at Big Rock and calling it “La Rocher Française.”

A Goodspeed county history from 1889 tells it almost the same way, with a couple of differences you might catch. It doesn’t name an explorer, just “the French explorers,” and it spells the name “La Petite Rochelle.” It says the point was “the first rock which they discovered in ascending the stream from its mouth,” which made it a landmark for boatmen. It also says where to find it: at the foot of Rock Street, under the south end of the lower bridge.

The plainer version

Henry Gannett’s 1905 list of American place names for the U.S. Geological Survey skips the French part entirely. Little Rock, he writes, was “so named because it is built upon a bed of rock.” That’s not quite the same story. The local histories are clear that the name belonged to one small point on the riverbank, not to the ground under the whole town.

A post office with no better name

When settlers showed up, the name came along. In a 1911 paper for the Arkansas Historical Association, U. M. Rose wrote that a post office opened there on April 10, 1820, “called for the want of another name, Little Rock.” He added that it was “as if nature herself” had “stood sponsor to the place.” Some people in town did want another name, as it turns out.

Little Rock versus Arkopolis

Two groups of speculators claimed the same ground, and each laid out its own town. Herndon borrows the best line about it from Josiah Shinn’s Pioneers and Makers of Arkansas: “One town was called Little Rock and the town on top of it was called Arkopolis.”

The new name had its moment. At a “large and respectable meeting of the citizens” on February 3, 1821, Herndon writes, the name Arkopolis was adopted. One letter writer dated his note to the Gazette “Arkopolis (formerly Little Rock)” and explained the name as “a combination of the first syllable of Arkansas and the Greek word polis, meaning ‘city.’” The Goodspeed history says people disliked the old name because it applied “only to a certain point,” though it also says the new name “was never adopted.”

It didn’t last. Once the rival claimants settled in the fall of 1821, Herndon says, Arkopolis was dropped, and the place “has ever since been known as Little Rock.” The Goodspeed book adds that the early proprietors had written into the first town plat that it should be “forever known by the name of Little Rock.” So the city you know today kept the name of one rock on the riverbank, even after a meeting of its own citizens voted to trade it in.

Sources & further reading

• Dallas T. Herndon, ed., Centennial History of Arkansas, vol. 1 (1922). La Harpe at Big Rock (p. 91); La Petite Roche and Big Rock (p. 819); the rival towns and the Shinn quote (p. 823); the February 3, 1821, meeting, “Arkopolis (formerly Little Rock)” and the end of the name in 1821 (p. 824).
• Goodspeed, Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Pulaski … Counties (1889), pp. 381–382. “La Petite Rochelle,” the rock at the foot of Rock Street under the bridge, the 1821 meeting and “forever known by the name of Little Rock.”
• U. M. Rose, “Chester Ashley” (Arkansas Historical Association, 1911). The rock as “the abutment of a railway bridge” and the post office of April 10, 1820, “called for the want of another name, Little Rock.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). The “bed of rock” explanation.
• GNIS feature 83350 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record, which lists Little Rock as the capital of Arkansas.