For Little Rock Public Radio, this is Dan Boice, with Naming Arkansas and postal misspellings.
Stone County has had more than its share of names garbled by either the postal service or by some very bad handwriting on the part of local postmasters. A prime example is in the western part of the county where, in 1908, residents of a community informally called Lower Clark decided they needed their own post office and the postmaster suggested naming the town after the winner of an upcoming beauty contest. The contest winner was Malinda Iona Ballentine, who went by Iona and was nicknamed Onie. The town’s application asked for the town’s official name to be Onie, but the postal service bureaucrat determined that what they had written was Onia, and so that became and has remained the official name of the town for well over a century as another lesson in the importance of good penmanship.
For the University of Arkansas at Monticello, this is Dan Boice