Louisiana Purchase through Early Statehood

In November 1829, the territorial legislature formed Union County from parts of Hempstead and Clark counties. The next spring, the county court convened at the former colonial trading post of Ecore Fabre (now Camden in Ouachita County) on a bluff overlooking the Ouachita River. In 1837, county officers anticipated that a pending division of the county would slice away the Ecore Fabre region and approved the relocation of the county seat farther down the river to another port, Scarborough’s Landing. Over the following two decades, three counties and parts of six others were carved from the original Union County. Reflecting a changing economy, many residents in 1843 signed a petition requesting that the county seat be moved inland from the river floodplain and closer to major cotton farms. Three commissioners asked Matthew Rainey to surrender 160 acres he had preempted on a ridge that was the county’s highest point, about twelve miles from the river. A surveyor platted the newly christened El Dorado, and officials approved $200 to build a courthouse on the town square.

Immigrants from Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi spurred a rapid population growth in the 1840s, followed by a slower rise in the next decade. More than half of the 12,288 residents in 1860 were slaves. About five percent of the landholders were planters (holding twenty or more slaves), and a third of the county’s slaves labored on these larger farms. Besides raising corn, Union County was second in the state in the production of peas, beans, and sweet potatoes.

By 1833, Methodist circuit riders conducted church services in cabins, while a Primitive Baptist congregation met in the southeast part of the county. About 1843, residents of Scotland, immigrants from the Carolinas who clung to their Scottish ancestry, organized the first Presbyterian church; soon after, Reverend William Lacy from that congregation established a Presbyterian church in the new county seat. Records indicate that a school was operating in south Union County by 1838. In 1843, Lacy and his wife, Julia, formed El Dorado’s first private academy in their small home. After two years, he left to manage his plantation and turned his students over to Elizabeth Banks, who founded what became El Dorado Female Institute (current site of South Arkansas Community College). The school occupied land donated by Albert Rust, the first U.S. congressman from Union County.

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