Umpire is an unincorporated community in Howard County. In the early 1890s a new gristmill opened in the Umpire area. There was a baseball game to celebrate the new mill, after which a schoolteacher addressed the crowd and suggested the name Umpire for the new post office, because the Umpire did an outstanding job overseeing the game (Wikipedia, 2019). At one time there were 6,697 total mining claims in Umpire, although only seventy-nine of these actually had a working mine and forty-three of these produced Uranium, which was the main mineral mined in that area. Today only eighteen of the mining claims are still active (Diggings, 2019).
Citations
Diggings. (2019). Umpire, Arkansas Mining Claims And Mines. Retrieved from thediggings.com.
Wikipedia. (2019, Oct. 2). Umpire, Arkansas. Retrieved from en.wikipedia.org.
How it all Began 