Texarkana, Arkansas: Two States in the Name, or Three?

Nobody can say for sure who came up with the name Texarkana, Arkansas, and the old books can’t even agree on how many states are packed into it. One says two, Texas and Arkansas. Another says three, with the tail end of Louisiana tacked on, and a third gives you both.

Surveyors in a camp on the state line

The fullest account is in a Goodspeed history of southern Arkansas from 1890. About 1856, it says, surveyors for the Cairo & Fulton Railway reached the Texas line and were camped “on the site of Texarkana,” talking over how important the spot would be as a terminal point. Col. Calvin M. Hervey was in the party, and he “claims to have suggested the combination of parts of the names of the three States about Miller County — Tex-as, Ark-ansas and Louisi-ana.”

Notice the word “claims.” The book doesn’t say Hervey did it. It says he said so. It also says the place went by Texarkana from then on, “although there was no town-plat or even a house for many years.”

The boat that got there first

The very next line undercuts Hervey. “A Red River boat also bore this name long before this incident occurred,” the Goodspeed history says. It doesn’t name the boat’s owner or give a year, so you’re left with a name that may have been floating up and down the Red River before anyone camped on the state line.

Two states or three

Henry Gannett, compiling place names for the U.S. Geological Survey in 1905, went with the simple answer. Texarkana sits “near the border between Arkansas and Texas,” and the name is “a combination of these two names.” No Louisiana.

Dallas Herndon’s 1922 state history gives both. First the two-state version: the city “derives its name from the two states.” Then the one he calls “most probable”: that Hervey suggested a name made of “the first three letters of Texas, the first four of Arkansas, and the last two of Louisiana.” If you spell it out, that’s Tex, plus Arka, plus na, which is exactly Texarkana. Herndon’s version, though, drops the boat and drops Goodspeed’s careful “claims.”

A name before a town

Whoever thought it up, the name waited a long time for a town. The same book says the railroad owned the land, settlers camped in tents in the fall of 1873, and the railway platted a town about November 1873, with streets running alongside the track near the state line. Herndon says that’s when the name “was formally adopted.” The line between Texas and Arkansas ran right through it, and the two states’ different laws meant “two totally distinct municipalities, post offices and county seats” from the start. The 1890 book compared them to “the Siamese twins, with two heads, but always acting together.”

Sources & further reading

• Goodspeed, Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Southern Arkansas (1890), Miller County, pp. 185–186. The 1856 survey camp, Calvin M. Hervey’s claim, the three states, the earlier Red River boat, the 1873 plat and the “Siamese twins.”
• Dallas T. Herndon, ed., Centennial History of Arkansas, vol. 1 (1922), p. 884. Both versions, two states and three, with Hervey’s letter-by-letter formula; the name “formally adopted” in the fall of 1873.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). The two-state version: Arkansas and Texas.
• GNIS feature 78542 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Texarkana, Arkansas. It has no note on the name.