Jump Starts in Cabot Arkansas

Cabot is the largest city in Lonoke County, Arkansas, United States, and a suburb of Little Rock. As of the 2010 census, the population of the city was 23,776, and in 2019 the population was an estimated 26,352, ranking it as the state’s 19th largest city, behind Jacksonville. It is part of the Little Rock–North Little Rock–Conway Metropolitan Statistical Area.

Before the city of Cabot existed, an 1862 typhoid epidemic took the lives of about 1,500 Confederate soldiers previously under Allison Nelson who were camped at Camp Nelson in the hills surrounding Cabot and Austin. In 1905, 428 poorly marked graves were exhumed by a group of Confederate veterans and moved to a new site at Camp Nelson Confederate Cemetery. Marble gravestones were placed over each grave and a large marble obelisk was erected to honor the dead. In 1982, a group of volunteers from Cabot began maintaining the cemetery, which had fallen into disrepair.^{[citation needed]}

The city of Cabot sprang up as a small settlement around a refueling station on the Cairo & Fulton Railroad after it bypassed Austin. The settlement first appeared in 1873 and is thought to have been named after railroad executive George Cabot Ward. The First Baptist Church was established in 1876, and the Cabot United Methodist Church in 1881. G. W. Grandberry began publication of the first newspaper in 1885, named “The Guard”. Grandberry, along with James Milton Park served as the towns medical doctors.^{[citation needed]} By 1889 businesses began growing alongside the railroad tracks. Businesses included six general stores, two drugstores, a hotel owned by James Charles Boyd, James Adam’s livery stable, and the Neely brothers cotton gin. The Bank of Cabot (later merged into Centennial Bank) was founded in 1903. The city of Cabot was officially incorporated November 9, 1891, as the 139th city in Arkansas.

Cabot was often overshadowed in northern Lonoke County by what at the time was the much larger city of Austin (originally named Oakland). However, Cabot experienced growth during the 1950s and 1960s, due to its proximity to the Little Rock Air Force Base in nearby Jacksonville which opened in 1955, as well as due to the “white flight” occurring in response to the racial discord in Little Rock, Arkansas caused by school desegregation and its following crisis.

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