Marion County First County Seat

Yellville began as Shawneetown. Shawnee families left this stretch of the White River country after 1828, and white settlers took over their houses and farms, calling the place Shawneetown; a post office opened in 1831. When the county was organized, residents renamed the seat for Archibald Yell, Arkansas's first member of Congress. Local tradition says Yell offered the town fifty dollars for the honor and never paid. In 2005 his descendants gave the city fifty dollars in his name. Yellville was incorporated January 3, 1855, and the current courthouse, its fifth, was finished in 1944.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rush Historic District — 9.9 mi
  The zinc-mining camp on Rush Creek that boomed from the 1880s, emptied after 1919 and now stands inside Buffalo National River as a ghost town.
• Bull Shoals-White River State Park — 12 mi
  A state park below Bull Shoals Dam, where a visitor center overlooks the dam and lake and the White River below is a nationally known trout stream.
• Buffalo National River at Tyler Bend — 17 mi
  The country's first national river, kept free-flowing after a dam fight that ended in 1965, seen from the Middle District's visitor center, the Collier Homestead and the Riverview Trail.
• Jacob Wolf House — 22 mi
  Arkansas's oldest public structure, a two-story dogtrot log house at the Norfork confluence that served as the Izard County courthouse in 1829 and later as a family home.

More markers nearby

• Troops Raised in Marion County — 0.3 mi
• Yellville in the Civil War — 0.3 mi
• Skirmish at Tomahawk — 15 mi
• Skirmish at Rolling Prairie — 16 mi