Winslow, Arkansas

Taking a short side-jaunt from the highway, I drove into Winslow, Arkansas, the Home of Gibson's Baskets.

This area has been inhabited for 12,000 years. In the 1700s, the Osage claimed the land from the Arkansas River north into what is now central Missouri. Although their main villages were in Missouri, they traveled into Arkansas to hunt. In the early 1800s, settlers began to move into the mountains.

Shortly after the Civil War, Elijah Woolum established the Woolum-Brown Stage Line between Fayetteville and Alma.  A boon to the area, the stop became known as Summit Home.

The town flourished in the 1880s with the arrival of the St Louis-San Francisco Railway. Winslow-area residents found work harvesting timber for railroad ties and fence posts. Reported to be the highest railroad pass on the line between the Rocky and Appalachian mountains, this made Winslow a popular summer resort area. The Winslow Tunnel was completed in 1882.

An application to the Post Office Department on August 3, 1881, changed the town’s name from Summit Home to Winslow, for Edward Winslow, president of the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway.

Fort Smith physician Albert Dunlap visited in the 1880s, built a home, moved his family to Winslow, and encouraged his friends from Fort Smith to visit. In the early 1900s, Thomas Harris, whose family originally came from Illinois as summer visitors, developed Winslow Park Club on a mountain east of town and started the Winslow's resort era.

In 1908, Gilbert and Maud Duncan bought the Winslow newspaper, the Winslow American; it continued weekly until 1953.

Maud Duncan was one of the state’s few female pharmacists at this time. In 1925, she ran for mayor with an all-female city council and won. The “Petticoat Government” was elected for a second term in 1926, but the women declined to run for a third term.

In the 1930s, drought ruined the economy more than the Depression. Marketable timber was disappearing and the major crops, apples, strawberries, and vegetables, failed. As people moved west the summer tourists disappeared. Over the next 30 years, hotels closed, buildings were razed or burned and the town became a shell of its former self.

When the men left for World War II, the women took over as postmaster, depot agent, and ran the businesses. At war's end, Winslow had nothing to offer the returning soldiers, families moved, the population declined.

In the late 1960s, the Winslow area attracted people looking to find a simpler life by growing their own food and raising their children away from the cities. The interstate by-passed the city by 7 miles but cut the travel time to nearby cities. Today, the quaint village of Winslow is a “bedroom community' for folks working in the surrounding cities.

Looked empty and available -- didn't find a 'For Sale" sign.