The St. Louis and San Francisco Railway Co. (StL&SF), better known as the Frisco, was organized in 1876 in Missouri. By 1881, the company had acquired or built lines crisscrossing central and southern Missouri and had begun extending into the northern corners of Arkansas. Although the Frisco never built into the heart of Arkansas, its feeder lines across northwestern and northeastern Arkansas connected communities with other lines across the state as well as the markets north to Chicago, Illinois, and south to the Gulf of Mexico, allowing development of agricultural resources, industrial hubs, and resort communities on the periphery of the state.

The Frisco was built on remnants of the older Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, acquiring right of way and track after that railroad’s bankruptcy. Like its predecessor, the Frisco was intended to build a line to the West Coast, with aims to cross the continent roughly following the thirty-fifth parallel. Fort Smith (Sebastian County) was on this intended route, which made it a logical point toward which the Frisco could build.

Only a step behind the western construction, the Frisco also began developing a network of track in northeast Arkansas. Both northern corners of the state proved to be commercially vital for the Frisco, initially because of the great timber resources across the northern part of the state. The rail boom across Arkansas and the rest of the nation during the 1880s meant that much of the timber was used for railroading itself, but other timber-related industries grew along the Frisco tracks, from wagon builders to barrel-stave makers to lumber yards for building construction. This boom shifted Arkansas’s population during the late nineteenth century away from the steamboat cities and into the burgeoning new towns along the rail lines.

The Frisco’s first line into Arkansas came south from Monette, Missouri. The Frisco began construction of its Arkansas Division near the present-day town of Gateway (Benton County). The line reached the newly founded town of Rogers (Benton County)—which was named in honor of the Frisco’s general manager, Charles Warrington Rogers—on May 10, 1881. Less than a month later, on June 8, 1881, a passenger train with Charles Rogers aboard entered the northern limits of Fayetteville (Washington County) for the first time. A crowd estimated by local papers in the thousands celebrated the arrival.

By the end of the year, the Frisco had built south along the West Fork of the White River to its first major obstacle: the Boston Mountains. A temporary track was built over the hilltop at Winslow (Washington County) while work began on a 1,400-foot-long tunnel, the state’s first railroad tunnel. South of the tunnel, the terrain of the route proved just as difficult, with three high trestle bridges being built to cross deep hollows in the next 2.5 miles, the tallest of which was 117 feet.

Meanwhile, the Fort Smith and Van Buren Bridge Co., capitalized by the Frisco, began construction of a bridge over the Arkansas River at Van Buren (Crawford County), finishing it in 1885 and allowing the railway line to continue southwest to Paris, Texas. From Fort Smith, the Frisco also built a branch to Mansfield (Sebastian County).

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, a variety of spurs, branches, and short lines were built off this mainline. The first was a short line run east slightly more than twenty miles from Seligman, Missouri, to the young resort town of Eureka Springs (Carroll County), where the Frisco was instrumental in building the Crescent Hotel. Another spur ran west to Bentonville (Benton County) and eventually continued into the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Just south of Fayetteville, a short line was built southeast up the White River valley to St. Paul (Madison County) and Pettigrew (Madison County). This line was designed to get at the hardwoods of the Ozark Mountains to supply the railway company with oak ties as well as feed the booming lumber industry. More short lines were built at the turn of the century. One line, the Kansas City and Memphis Railroad, ran from Fayetteville to Cave Springs (Benton County). It became known locally as the “Fruit Basket Line” because of all the apple and peach orchards from which it hauled produce. Another line out of Fayetteville, the Ozark and Cherokee Central, ran west through Farmington (Washington County), Prairie Grove (Washington County), and Lincoln (Washington County) to Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

Along with the freight, the Frisco began marketing resort towns across northwest Arkansas, such as Eureka Springs, Sulphur Springs (Benton County), Monte Ne (Benton County), and Winslow, the “summit of the Ozarks.”

In the northeastern corner of the state, the Frisco built a line south along the west side of the Mississippi River in the 1880s through Blytheville (Mississippi County), Osceola (Mississippi County), and Marion (Crittenden County) to Memphis, Tennessee. Railcars were initially ferried across the Mississippi River until a bridge was built in 1892 by the Memphis Railway Bridge Company, a company created by the Kansas City, Fort Scott and Gulf Railroad (KCFS&G). The KCFS&G had built a line from Springfield, Missouri, to Memphis, entering Arkansas south of Thayer, Missouri, and following the Spring River southeast through Jonesboro (Craighead County) to Memphis. The Frisco bought this line at the turn of the twentieth century, consolidating its commercial interests in the region.

After timber began to run out, the Frisco shifted its emphasis to moving cotton out of the region to market. Again, short lines such as the Jonesboro, Lake City and Eastern Railroad helped the Frisco remain financially solvent. The northeast Arkansas lines of the Frisco eventually provided connections through to Pensacola, Florida, and Mobile, Alabama, where goods and produce from Arkansas could be shipped to ports.

During the early 1900s, the Frisco began purchasing the capital of lines it had already been operating. It purchased the St. Louis, San Francisco and New Orleans Railroad, which gave it a line from Indian Territory to Hope (Hempstead County). Other Arkansas acquisitions included the Bonnerville and Southwestern; the Tyronza Central Railroad; the Ozark and Cherokee Central Railway; and the St. Louis, Memphis and Southeastern Railroad.

The downside of the Frisco’s consistent expansion and acquisition was that it faced difficult financial straits by 1912 when it was sustaining operating deficits averaging $1 million a year. Levees along the Mississippi River gave way that year, flooding the mainline for more than a month and a half, hurting its revenue further. In 1913, the railroad went into receivership and was operated by the federal government during World War I. Put back into stockholders’ hands after the war, the Frisco struggled through the 1920s and 1930s, falling into receivership again during the Depression and closing many of its branch lines.

After World War II, the Frisco became a much leaner company with emphasis on its profitable freight lines. With the rise of automobile use and the interstate system, passenger service declined on all rail lines during the 1950s. The Frisco terminated its passenger service in 1965 but continued most of its freight lines until 1978, when it was merged with Burlington Northern Railroad.

Today, Burlington Northern–Santa Fe continues to operate most of the Frisco’s main lines in northeast Arkansas. In northwest Arkansas, the main line between Monette and Fort Smith was sold to the Arkansas and Missouri Railroad. The southwest line into Hope was sold to the Kiamichi Railroad.

For additional information:
Dew, Lee A. “The J.L.C. and E.R.R. and the Opening of the ‘Sunk Lands’ of Northeast Arkansas.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 27 (Spring 1968): 22–39.

The Frisco: A Look Back at the Saint Louis-San Francisco Railway. Springfield-Green County Library. http://thelibrary.springfield.missouri.org/lochist/frisco/frisco.cfm (accessed July 7, 2009).

Hull, Clifton E. Shortline Railroads of Arkansas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969.

Miner, H. Craig. The St. Louis-San Francisco Transcontinental Railroad: The Thirty-fifth Parallel Project, 1853–1890. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1972.

Winn, Robert G. Railroads of Northwest Arkansas. Fayetteville, AR: Washington County Historical Society, 1986.

Woods, Stephen E. “The Development of Arkansas Railroads, Part I.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 7 (Summer 1948): 103–140.

———. “The Development of Arkansas Railroads, Part II.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 7 (Autumn 1948): 155–193.

Charles Y. Alison
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville