Facts about Arkansas

Wal-Mart was founded by Sam Walton in Bentonville.
  

The name Arkansas comes from an Indian word that means down-stream people.
 

Pivot Rock balances on a base 15 times smaller than its top.
 

The Ozark National Forest covers more than one million acres.
 

Alma is claimed to be the Spinach Capital of the World.
 

The Basin Park Hotel in Eureka Springs is seven stories tall, but every floor is a “ground” floor.  The hotel is built against a hillside, and each story opens onto the hill at a different height.
 

There are 47 hot springs that flow from the southwestern slope of Hot Springs Mountain, at an average temperature of 143F.
 

In 1983, Arkansas becomes the first state to require teachers to pass a basic skills test.
 

The Arkansas River is the longest stream to flow into the Mississippi-Missouri river system.  Its total length is 1,450 miles.
 

Large burial mounds found in Arkansas were a prominent feature of the region's last prehistoric culture, the Mississippian, which began about 700 AD.
 

Buffalo National River, which cuts through massive limestone bluffs in the Ozark Mountains, is one of the few remaining free-flowing rivers in the lower 48 states.
 

During the 1930s, the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, a radical labor group based in Arkansas, brought national attention to the tenant farming and sharecropping system.
 

Hattie O. W. Caraway (D) was the first woman elected to the United States Senate. She succeeded her husband in 1932.