Arkansas

F

Tourist Industry

The tourist industry is one of Arkansas’s most important sources of income. Visitors spend $3.9 billion each year in the state. More than 2 million people are attracted to national parks in Arkansas, while nearly 8 million people use the many state parks.

G

Transportation

The arrival of the first steamboat at Little Rock in 1822 caused a transportation revolution in Arkansas. Reaching its peak in the years immediately following the Civil War, steamboat travel remained the principal means of transport until the emergence of the railroads in the late 1870s.

Roads, which had to be hacked out of the tangled undergrowth of the Mississippi bottomlands or the dense forest of the uplands, were slow in developing in Arkansas. The Southwest Trail, along the edge of the Ozarks and Ouachitas, was the best known of Arkansas’s early roads. Today, the focus of transportation routes in Arkansas is Little Rock. Arkansas has a network of 158,691 km (98,606 mi) of federal, state, and local roads, including 1,056 km (656 mi) of interstate highways. The state is served by a system of 4,332 km (2,692 mi) of railroad track. Arkansas has 9 airports, but only one, at Little Rock, falls into the largest commercial classification.

H

Trade

Early in the 19th century, Little Rock began to develop as a commercial center. During the California gold rush of the 1840s, Fort Smith boomed as a supply depot. Pine Bluff became the state’s leading cotton port after the American Civil War (1861-1865); with the arrival of the railroad it also became a lumber center. The railroads also fostered the growth of other cities.

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Today, Little Rock is still the center of trade. The completion in 1971 of the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System, tying in to the Mississippi River-Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, has made the Arkansas an important part of the nation’s inland waterways (see Intracoastal Waterway). Little Rock, Fort Smith, and Pine Bluff are major ports on the Arkansas; the state’s only ports on the Mississippi are Osceola and Helena.

IV

The People of Arkansas

A

Population Patterns

In the 2000 national census, Arkansas had 2,673,400 inhabitants, compared with 2,350,725 in 1990. Between 1940 and 1960 Arkansas lost population as its displaced farm workers moved to other states in search of jobs. The development of new industries, beginning in the late 1950s, reversed this trend; between 1970 and 1980 the population increased by 18.9 percent, it grew 2.8 percent between 1980 and 1990, and 13.7 percent between 1990 and 2000.

The urban population of Arkansas has risen steadily. The rural population declined from the 1940s through the 1960s, but in the 1970s it again increased. Nevertheless, the urbanizing trend continued. By 2000, 53 percent of the people of Arkansas lived in areas defined as urban. The average population density in 2006 was 21 persons per sq km (54 per sq mi).

Whites make up 80 percent of Arkansas’s population and blacks comprise 15.7 percent. Between 1860 and 1930 blacks made up more than one-third of the population. Beginning in the 1930s, many blacks left Arkansas to seek employment in the North, and their numbers in the state declined. While the total number of blacks is again increasing, the percentage increase is less than the growth in the population as a whole, so their proportion of the state’s people continues to decline. Native Americans account for 0.7 percent of the population, Asians 0.1 percent, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders 0.1 percent, and those of mixed heritage or not reporting race 2.8 percent. Hispanics, who may be of any race, are 3.2 percent of the people.

B

Principal Cities

The principal cities are Little Rock, with a 2005 population of 184,564, the state capital and chief commercial center, on the Arkansas River; Fort Smith (82,481), an industrial center; North Little Rock (58,803), on the opposite bank of the river; Pine Bluff (52,693), a center of the state’s wood-processing industry; Jonesboro (59,358), a commercial and farm-goods processing center; Fayetteville (66,655), an industrial city and distribution center for a rich agricultural region; and Hot Springs (37,847), a resort and spa in the Ouachita Mountains.

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