“He brought them to the nearby school principal, who recognized them as significant historical documents“
Sometimes the most interesting part of a title search is discovering the story behind a place that doesn’t even exist anymore.
Lovely County was created in Arkansas Territory in 1827. For a brief moment, it was a perfectly functioning county, complete with a sheriff, coroner, clerk, and other local officials. (It also supplied most of the salt for Arkansas, one cent for a pound of salt anyone?)
However, in 1828, a new federal treaty changed the western boundary of Arkansas Territory. Most of Lovely County ended up on the other side of the new boundary, and by October of that year, the county was gone.
In addition to the county disappearing however, so did its records! It took over 100 years to find them. In 1966, a local man named “Dutch” Morrows noticed some old, yellowed papers by a dump in Oklahoma. He brought them to the nearby school principal, who recognized them as significant historical documents. The principal in turn went to the local museum and together figured out these were the missing Lovely County records! The records were preserved and properly archived, giving historians a glimpse into a county that had vanished more than a century earlier.
That’s what makes old property records so fascinating. A document that looks like an ordinary piece of paper can sometimes lead back to a place that disappeared, a boundary that changed, or a piece of history that almost ended up in a dump.
At Real Title Services, we see firsthand how much history can be hiding in the public record. Sometimes, it leads to a place that disappeared more than a century ago.
Angela Sharp
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