07/21/2026
The Road Through Dallas
Polk County, Arkansas, in the Civil War
Sixty-three Union cavalrymen turned onto the Waldron and Dallas Road.
It was December 5, 1863. The larger Federal expedition had left Waldron three days earlier and crossed the Ouachita Mountains through Mount Ida. After reaching Caddo Gap, part of the column turned back with exhausted horses. The remaining cavalry continued under Colonel Owen A. Bassett.
Bassett’s men rode to the Ouachita River, then northwest until they reached the road to Dallas. There, sixty-three men were sent toward the Polk County seat, at the place now known locally as Old Dallas.
Mena did not exist.
There was no railroad town beneath Rich Mountain. No depot. No streets beside the tracks. No courthouse where Polk County government meets today.
There was Dallas.
The town stood on Long’s Trail, a stagecoach road connected northward with the Butterfield Overland Mail route and extending south into Indian Territory. Before the war, it carried mail, merchandise, livestock, travelers, and news.
The road made Dallas useful.
Then it made Dallas vulnerable.
The patrol returned on December 6 with two Confederate prisoners. While the scout was underway, the main Federal force camped along the Fourche La Fave. When the expedition reached Waldron the following day, its men had traveled 156 miles through winter mountain country.
The military report recorded the distance, the prisoners, and the condition of the horses.
It did not name a civilian in Dallas.
What Dallas Sent Away
Archibald Ray represented Polk County at the Arkansas Secession Convention.
Ray was a physician and local political figure. His signature appeared on the ordinance adopted May 6, 1861, dissolving Arkansas’s union with the United States.
The federal census preserved Ray’s name.
The accompanying slave schedule listed seven people enslaved by him according to age, s*x, and color, but not by name.
Across Polk County, 172 people were enslaved in 1860. The number was small compared with those of Arkansas plantation counties, but slavery remained part of the county’s economy, its households, and the political order Arkansas left the United States to defend.
After secession, local volunteers formed companies with names meant to sound certain of victory.
The Polk County Invincibles became Company H of the Fourth Arkansas Infantry. The Polk Rifles became Company I of the same regiment.
The Fourth Arkansas fought at Pea Ridge before being transferred east of the Mississippi River. Its men later served in Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas.
They traveled farther from Polk County with every campaign.
Their absence did not leave the county united behind them.
Research assembled for the Arkansas Civil War Sesquicentennial identified at least seventy-three Polk County men who enlisted in the Union army. Others deserted, resisted conscription, joined irregular bands, or tried to remain beyond the reach of either government.
Men from the same county entered opposing armies.
The mountains gave them places to hide, but no place beyond the claims of war.
What the Road Brought Back
For the first two years of the conflict, Polk County remained beyond the principal movements of large armies.
That changed in 1863.
Federal forces occupied Fort Smith and established a military presence at Waldron. From there, Union troops could enter the Ouachitas in search of Confederate detachments, prisoners, intelligence, recruits, and usable roads.
The December expedition revealed the limits of that reach.
Its original column included cavalry, infantry, and artillery. Exhausted animals forced the artillery and part of the cavalry to turn back before the operation was complete.
In Polk County, military power depended upon horses as much as men.
The remaining troops divided into smaller patrols. One rode toward Dallas. Others moved through Caddo Gap and the surrounding mountain country.
Federal cavalry could reach the county seat. Its presence there remained temporary.
The soldiers gathered information, captured men, and withdrew. Confederate troops, scouts, couriers, deserters, and irregular bands continued moving through the same country.
The official chronology grew more crowded the following month.
Between January 25 and January 28, 1864, it recorded separate actions involving the Second Kansas Cavalry at Sulphur Springs near present-day Cove, on the Little Missouri River, at Caddo Gap, and at Dallas.
Dallas appeared as the site of a skirmish on January 28.
The record preserves the place, date, and Union unit but little else. It does not provide a complete account of the Confederate force, the duration of the fighting, or what occurred within the town.
Dallas entered the military history of the war in a line.
The roads reveal the broader condition.
Federal troops could ride from Waldron through the mountains and reach the Polk County seat. Armed men of every allegiance could use the same narrow routes after they withdrew.
Control depended upon movement. Military authority arrived on horseback and departed the same way.
Dallas remained where the roads met.
What the Fire Took
The first Polk County courthouse stood at Dallas.
During the war, it burned with the county records inside it.
An institutional history published by the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program attributes the fire to Union soldiers. The account does not identify the unit, precise date, or immediate circumstances.
The destruction itself is clear.
The courthouse and all its records were lost.
Deeds, tax books, probate files, estates, guardianships, marriages, lawsuits, debts, and county proceedings disappeared with the building. Those were the papers through which property, family relationships, obligations, and dealings with local government had been preserved.
Military reports show when Federal soldiers approached Dallas.
Muster rolls show which men entered military service.
The secession ordinance preserves Archibald Ray’s signature.
The courthouse held a different kind of county record.
Its destruction was especially consequential for the 172 enslaved people counted in Polk County in 1860. Federal slave schedules generally recorded enslaved people by age, s*x, and color beneath the enslaver’s name rather than their own.
Deeds, probate files, estate papers, and court proceedings sometimes preserved names and family relationships that those schedules omitted.
At Dallas, much of that evidence burned.
What survives therefore favors officers, regiments, military departments, state officials, and men whose names appeared on public documents. Those whose lives were recorded mainly in local transactions are harder to recover.
A replacement courthouse was built after the war.
It burned in 1883.
The county records were lost again.
Dallas survived both fires. It remained the county seat and a local center of government, trade, and travel.
The town endured without the archive that might have told more fully who had endured with it.
A Few Miles Away
In 1896, the Kansas City, Pittsburg and Gulf Railroad entered Polk County.
It bypassed Dallas.
Railroad developers chose a nearby site and built a new town beside the tracks.
They called it Mena.
Businesses opened around the depot. Streets were surveyed. Trains carried passengers and merchandise through a county whose older communities had depended upon mountain roads and wagon routes.
Two years later, Polk County voters moved the county seat from Dallas to Mena.
The road town yielded to the railroad town.
Today, the older settlement is known locally as Old Dallas. The name can make the place sound as though it had always been secondary, a remnant beside the city that replaced it.
During the Civil War, it was simply Dallas.
It was the county seat. It held the courthouse. Long’s Trail connected it with the wider region, and the Waldron and Dallas Road gave Federal cavalry a path toward it through the mountains.
Anyone searching for Mena’s Civil War history must therefore begin outside Mena.
The documented Federal expedition connected Waldron, Mount Ida, Caddo Gap, the Ouachita River country, and Dallas. Long’s Trail connected Dallas northward toward the Butterfield route and southward into Indian Territory.
Those roads carried Polk County men away in Confederate companies.
They later carried Federal cavalry toward the county seat.
The military reports preserved the mileage.
The courthouse fire took much of the local record.
Old Dallas is what the present calls the place now.
In 1863, it was not old.
The war came down that road to Dallas.
Thirty-three years later, the future arrived on steel a few miles away.
By Kenneth Thomas
Sources
- The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume 22, Part I.
- National Park Service, Arkansas Civil War battle and skirmish chronology.
- National Park Service, service histories of the Second Kansas Cavalry and Fourth Arkansas Infantry.
- Arkansas State Archives, Arkansas Ordinance of Secession, May 6, 1861.
- United States Census and slave schedules for Polk County, Arkansas, 1860.
- CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “Scout from Waldron to Mount Ida, Caddo Gap, and Dallas.”
- CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “Polk County.”
- CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “Dallas.”
- CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “Mena.”
- CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “Polk County Courthouse.”
- CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “Cove.”
- Arkansas Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission, “Polk County in the Civil War.”
- Polk County Genealogical Society transcriptions of the muster rolls for Companies H and I, Fourth Arkansas Infantry.
