Texarkana’s two separate municipalities—Texarkana, Miller County, Arkansas, and Texarkana, Bowie County, Texas—sometimes function as one city. The name is a composite of Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana, although Louisiana is thirty miles away. Texarkana, Arkansas, is the Miller County seat, and is home to the only Federal Building and post office situated in two states. The city’s motto is “Twice as Nice.” In the late 1850s, the builders of the Cairo and Fulton Railroad laid tracks in Arkansas, completing the railway to the Texas border in 1873. At the place where they would meet the Texas and Pacific Railroad (running east/west), a town site was established on December 8, 1873, with the sale of town lots. A sale of a town lot that day led to the opening of the town’s first business, a grocery and drugstore operated by George M. Clark. On December 8, 1873, a group met on the Texas side to organize the city. Texarkana, Texas, was granted a charter on June 12, 1874. In 1880, twenty-one citizens met and petitioned to incorporate Texarkana, Arkansas, but Texarkana, Arkansas, was granted its own charter on August 10, 1880 (Hendricks, 2019; cf. Wikipedia, 2019).
Citations
Hendricks, Nancy. (2019, Feb. 5). Texarkana (Miller County). Retrieved from encyclopediaofarkansas.net.
Wikipedia. (2019, Sep. 25). Texarkana, Texas. Retrieved from en.wikipedia.org.
How it all Began 