Van Buren began as Phillips Landing, a wood yard that James Phillips and his sons ran on the Arkansas River in the late 1820s to supply fuel to steamboats. The post office opened on March 30, 1831, and was named for Martin Van Buren. The townsite was sold in 1836 for $11,000 and surveyed in 1837, and the county seat came here in 1838. The town prospered until the Civil War, when Federal troops occupied it from 1862 to the war's end. By 1864 it was one of several Arkansas towns that drew freed people during the war.
The Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad arrived in 1876 and the Frisco line from St. Louis reached the river in 1883, and most of what stands on Main Street dates from the 1880s to the First World War. The Crawford County Bank, a three-story brick building at Seventh and Main, and the Citizens Bank next door both date from 1889, and the Anheuser-Busch building at Fifth and Main, from about 1890, is one of the few remaining beer depots in Arkansas. The railroad depot at Main and Fayetteville Streets has a clay-tile hipped roof. The district runs eight blocks, about 20 acres, from Cane Hill Street to the river, and was listed on the National Register on April 30, 1976.
The town's schools desegregated in 1957 and kept their integration through a student strike in 1958. About 400 African American soldiers of the 469th Quartermaster Truck Regiment helped restore farmland after the 1943 flood, and the librarian and collector Mayme Agnew Clayton lived here.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour