Central City, AR

Central City is a small Sebastian County city at the crossroads of Arkansas Highways 22 and 255, just west of Lavaca and within the Fort Smith area. Its early community center included a post office, a two-story school that also served as a church, and merchants serving the surrounding farms. The original school burned in the early 1930s; a rock replacement still stands and now serves as a community center.

The railroad depot was another local meeting point until the stop was abandoned and the building came down around 1939. In 1940, the federal government acquired more than 15,000 acres for Camp Chaffee, later Fort Chaffee, leaving Central City surrounded on three sides by the military base. New truck stops, diners, and gas stations followed the base's opening, but shoppers increasingly turned toward Fort Smith as transportation improved. Residents incorporated Central City in 1974 while nearby Barling was expanding east. Today the city remains a highway community with two active churches and a handful of older buildings, carrying the layers of school, railroad, military, and roadside history that shaped its small corner of Sebastian County.