Historian Documents Demise of Embattled Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad

The highly anticipated Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad, constructed in the early 20th century, provided shipping and passenger railway access for the first time to isolated Ozark Mountain communities such as Eureka Springs, terminating in Helena on the Arkansas Delta. But as historian Kenneth Barnes reveals, the promising railway — plagued by infrastructure failures, labor strikes and deadly anti-union mob violence incited by the Ku Klux Klan — was abandoned after four decades of operation. Barnes is authoring a book on the fraught history of the M&NA, to be published by the University of Arkansas Press.