Boxley Valley Historic District

The Osage hunted the Buffalo River country, and from 1817 to 1828 it was part of the Cherokee treaty lands, until the Cherokee were removed to Indian Territory. Some Boxley families still trace their ancestry to that Cherokee presence. Settlers took up land in the valley about 1830, among them the Whitley, Casey and Villines families, and the Walnut Grove Baptist congregation and a water-powered grist mill date to around 1840. The mill standing today replaced that first one and has been on the National Register since 1974.

The Civil War reached the valley because of a bat-guano cave on Cave Mountain that supplied nitre for gunpowder. Union forces destroyed the Confederate mining operation in January 1863. Today the valley is a National Register district of more than 8,000 acres, with around 170 historic buildings, from one-room log houses to dogtrots, stores, a sawmill and a church and school. Landowners could sell easements rather than their land, and the Park Service meant the valley to stay a living community, so small farms still keep large garden plots and livestock.

The valley's most recent residents came back by truck. Elk were gone from Arkansas by the 1840s. In 1981 Game and Fish Commissioner Hilary Jones of Pruitt and his friends traded channel catfish to Colorado for elk, and the first calf was born in 1982. The herd was estimated at 450 to 500 in 2009. Please watch from the road, because the fields and farmsteads are private.