Few
towns have a name as simple and short as Arp,
which sits on a railroad line and Texas Highway 135 eighteen miles southeast of
Tyler in Smith
County.
According
to local history, Arp was named for a newspaper columnist known as Bill Arp .
His real name was Charles Henry Smith, a young lawyer and well-known satirist
who lived in Georgia.
In the early 1900s, a man reportedly visited the
community on a Texas trip, using the name Bill Arp.
The people in the community were so impressed with Arp that they named their town
for him when a post office was established.
But the kicker is that Smith
never visited Arp.
In
1861, during the Civil War, Smith wrote a letter to President Lincoln, expressing
his sentiments toward Lincoln’s issuance of a proclamation that the militia of
the seceding states disperse and disband.
In the South, the proclamation,
which was met with both anger and amusement, came after Confederate batteries
had fired on Fort Sumter and most of the Southern states had withdrawn from the
Union.
A ferry boat operator read Smith’s letter to Lincoln, and asked
Smith if he was going to print the letter and if he was going to use his own name
to sign it.
Smith said he had not thought about a signature.
The
ferryman, known as Bill Arp, said, “Well, I wish you would put my name on that
letter for them is my sentiments.”
The Lincoln article was signed with
the ferryman’s name, which marked the beginning of the pen name Bill Arp, which
Smith used and made famous throughout the last quarter of the 19th century.
Smith
continued to write about the Civil War and for a quarter-century his weekly articles
were printed in the Atlanta Constitution under the name Bill Arp.
Smith
kept the Bill Arp name until his death at the age of 77. As for the real Bill
Arp, Smith often wondered what happened to the ferryman.
Before
becoming Arp, the community was
known as Jarvis Switch, Strawberry Switch, and Strawberry
in recognition for the area’s most productive crop.
In 1903, the Arp School
District was incorporated, composed of some 6,581 acres covering 10.28 square
miles and owned by 23 individuals.
When the city was finally incorporated
as Arp in 1931, the territory contained
less than two square miles within the city limits and had a population of less
than 650. But just how Arp got its
name remains a mystery of sorts.
Bob Bowman's East Texas
January 10, 2010 Column
A weekly column syndicated in 109 East Texas newspapers
Copyright
Bob Bowman
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