KUAR Arkansas’s Amazing Place Names # 32 Waldo
Sometimes, as they created new towns, railroads also led to the demise of existing places. When the Texas & St. Louis Railway was laid through Ouachita County, it went between the two towns of Richland and Seminary. Both towns withered away as their merchants and residents uprooted themselves and moved to the railway and the station in the middle, named Stephens for a railroad surveyor. Local legend says that the town, the boyhood home of historian Dee Brown, was supposed to be named Waldo, but a mapmaker got confused and assigned that name to another town fifteen miles away. In fact, the Columbia County station of Waldo was so named by the railroad in honor of a freight agent. Residents of the town of Lamartine, which had also been bypassed by the railroad, picked up and moved to that station and campaigned to have the growing town named New Lamartine, but the railroad insisted on Waldo. And so the towns of Richland, Seminary, and Lamartine were lost to history.
Daniel Boice
University of Arkansas at Monticello