#42 Catholic Names
While Baptists make up the largest Christian group within Arkansas, other Protestant denominations are not far behind. But Catholics also have been part of Arkansas since the explorations by Jesuit missionary priest Jacques Marquette in 1673. Early French trappers and explorers were largely Catholic, which explains why the first church built in Arkansas was the Catholic chapel at Arkansas Post. In the second half of the nineteenth century, several groups of Italian immigrants arrived in our state, and gave such Catholic names to their settlements as Catholic Point in Conway County, and O’Kean in Randolph County, named for a beloved priest. Around 1878, the Italians who settled in Logan County felt that the land looked much like their home in central Italy where St. Benedict founded his first monastery, and so they named it for that place, Subiaco, which has served as a home for Arkansas’s Benedictine community for a century. For the Daniel Boice
University of Arkansas at Monticello