Bonanza, AR

Bonanza is a Sebastian County city in the Fort Smith metropolitan area, where the 2020 census counted 587 residents. Coal was found near the Arkansas-Oklahoma line about twelve miles southeast of Fort Smith, and Central Coal and Coke built a company town there in the 1890s. Mines 12, 20, and 26 together employed hundreds of workers during the boom, the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway carried coal, and Bonanza incorporated on November 26, 1898.

The town's coal boom carried a painful history. In April and May 1904, white residents organized against Black mine workers, and violence drove nearly all of Bonanza's Black residents away. Mine 26 closed in 1919; the company dismantled its houses and moved them to Oklahoma, and the post office closed in 1959. Bonanza reincorporated in 1973. Today it remains a small community shaped by Fort Smith's growth and Hackett schools, with streets laid over a company-town plan that holds both industrial ambition and the damage done by racial terror.