Template:Wp-Monroe County, Arkansas-History

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Shortly after the United States had completed the Louisiana Purchase, officials began to survey the territory at a site near the intersection of Monroe, Phillips, and Lee counties. From forested wetlands in what would become southern Monroe County, approximately of land would be explored after President James Madison commissioned a survey of the purchase area. The point was commemorated in 1961 by the Arkansas General Assembly as part of Louisiana Purchase State Park.

Settlement in Monroe County began when Dedrick Pike settled in 1816 where the Cache River enters the White River. The settlement was named Mouth of the Cache, and a post office by that name was opened years later. The community renamed itself Clarendon in 1824 in honor of the Earl of Clarendon. Monroe County was established under the Arkansas territorial legislature in 1829, and the county seat was established at Lawrenceville, where a jail and courthouse were erected. A ferry across the White River was founded in 1836.

In 1857 the county seat was moved to Clarendon, Arkansas. The new brick courthouse was nearly finished by the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861. The county sent five units into Confederate service. After Union troops captured Clarendon in 1863, they destroyed the small city. The Union had completely dismantled the brick courthouse and shipped the bricks to De Valls Bluff.

After the war, during Reconstruction, there was a high level of violence by insurgent whites seeking to suppress the rights of freedmen and to keep them from voting. After Republican Congressman James M. Hinds was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Monroe County in October, 1868, Governor Powell Clayton established martial law in ten counties, including Monroe County, as the attacks and murders were out of control. Four military districts were operated for four years in an effort to suppress guerrilla insurgency by white paramilitary groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan and others. They continued to challenge enfranchisement of blacks and the increasing power of Republicans in the county. The Monroe County Sun newspaper was established in 1876.

Violence continued after Reconstruction, when Democrats had regained control of the state legislature. Whites struggled to re-establish white supremacy, by violence and intimidation of black Republican voters. At the turn of the century, the state legislature passed measures that effectively disenfranchised most blacks for decades. The Equal Justice Initiative reported in 2015 that the county had 12 lynchings of African Americans from 1877 to 1950, most in the decades near the turn of the 20th century. This was the fourth-highest of any county in the state.^[1] To escape the violence, thousands of African Americans left the state in the Great Migration to northern and western cities, especially after 1940.

Mechanization of farming and industrial-scale agriculture have decreased the need for workers. The rural county has continued to lose population because of the lack of work opportunities. There has been a decrease in population every decade since 1940.