For Little Rock Public Radio, this is Dan Boice, with Naming Arkansas and Clerical Errors
Long before there were computers with autocorrect, all official business was done by hand on paper with pen and ink. When Arkansas postmasters sent in to the U.S. Postal Service their handwritten requests for town names, postal authorities were more than once baffled in trying to read the cursive handwriting and so they had to take their best guess. Usually those guesses were correct. But when they weren’t, and the town received its official name, well, the results were not easily corrected. Some of those undecipherable or misread names remain on the Arkansas map to this day. For example, the Searcy county postmaster who wanted to name his town in honor of beloved sheriff Benjamin Franklin Snow, because of his poor penmanship gave us instead of Snow HALL the utterly improbable town name of Snowball. Join us as we take a wild journey through some of the town names that resulted from pen-and-ink confusion.
For the University of Arkansas at Monticello, this is Dan Boice