As we passed through the small community, my father would always point to the red brick building just off Highway 22 and jokingly state, “I spent the best three years of my life in the fifth grade right there.” The building, currently a general store, was the site of New Blaine schools.
Today, very little of the once-thriving town of New Blaine remains. Zip by the few scattered rock buildings, the Dinner Bucket café, a small post office, and a new Dollar General and you are through town in seconds. Set down with some of the old-time residents like my friend Kent Denton and you will discover there is so much more of the town than what meets the eye today.
The original town was simply Blaine and was named for James G. Blaine, a leading Republican and presidential candidate of the late 19th century. Blaine was involved in several railroad endeavors and was well known in Arkansas. Mr. Denton showed me through Old Blaine, a town I had heard of but never visited. Old Blaine was created as businesses along the old Military Road.
It began around where Elizabeth Hall cemetery is now located and consisted of several businesses and homes scattered on the north and south side of the small dirt road. The Rollan’s family store, a cotton gin, grist mill, and a lumber business made up the business part of the town. In the early 1900s, the Fort Smith, Subiaco, and Eastern railroad decided to connect the rail line from Paris to Dardanelle and then make the loop to Ola, Booneville, and back to Fort Smith. The line ran through the coal town of Scranton, passed through the narrows of Shoal Creek near what is now Shoal Bay recreation area, and on to Dardanelle.
A small depot was built north of Old Blaine. New businesses including a bank, several stores, and a church were built near the depot. The transportation system shifted north and the lumber mill, cotton gin, and stores moved their business and renamed the town, New Blaine.
Many of the old buildings, constructed of native rock by Aaron Moore, John Friga, and Freeborn Lasater still stand today and are part of the National Registry. By the late 1920s, New Blaine was a bustling town with a telephone company, barber, gas station, and several mercantile buildings. In 1929, highway 22 became the first paved road running through western Arkansas. It passed north of the New Blaine school and just south of main street New Blaine.
It offered easy and assessable transportation by truck and automobile but it also opened up a world to many of the younger residents who began to move away for better jobs, a problem exacerbated by the woes of the Great Depression. Farm production dropped, coal fields were depleted, and with them, the need for the rail system. The railroad took up the track and closed in the 1940s. Without the rail system, business again moved and formed a line along Highway 22.
Lasater’s service station, White’s barbershop, and the post office were now on the highway and the school had been consolidated with Paris. In 1962, Lake Dardanelle was built and waters covered many of the old homes and farms and lapped along highway 22. By 1966, a new bridge over shoal creek resulted in a shifting of a portion of the highway to the south and New Blaine was again bypassed.
New Blaine has always been a town on the move. The town’s existence today shows the resiliency of the population, the ability to change and to adapt to the world we inherit.
