KUAR Arkansas’s Amazing Place Names # 34 Kensett
Connecticut native Thomas Harrison Kensett was an investor in the Cairo & Fulton Railroad and he is the source of both the name of the railroad station and the White County town of Kensett that quickly grew up around it. But journalist and storyteller extraordinaire Ernie Deane tells how a local story sprang up with far more color: as the railroad crew was finishing up their work, says the tale, the crewmen asked the construction supervisor where to locate the new station. The Irish straw boss is supposed to have said, “Wall, boyos, you kin set it here or you kin set it there,” and so came the name Kensett. A town in Iowa is also named Kensett and for the same railroad investor, but that unimaginative town – unlike ours -- has not a single Irish straw boss in its lackadaisical history.
Daniel Boice
University of Arkansas at Monticello