Clay County

For Little Rock Public Radio, this is Dan Boice, with Naming Arkansas.
Arkansas’s 75 counties mostly bear the names of presidents, governors, or soldiers. One county is named for, well, no one is entirely sure who it’s named for. In the 1870s, the Radical Republican state government created a number of new counties, including Lincoln and Grant. Up in northeast Arkansas, they created Clayton County, named for either state senator John M. Clayton or his brother, former Union general and current governor Powell Clayton. When the Democrats retook power in 1874, the county’s residents (or at least the white residents) petitioned the legislature to shorten the name Clayton County to Clay County, and in so doing to honor – and here the petitioners had to think hard – the U.S. senator from Kentucky, Henry Clay, who had died twenty-two years before and, as far as anyone knew, had never been to Arkansas. The state legislature agreed, and so the name of the reviled Clayton was cut down to size.
For the University of Arkansas at Monticello this is Dan Boice.