Yesterdays RONDO Community, in Miller County, Arkansas
**********
RONDO  TRIVIA
Old Rondo Methodist Church and Masonic Hall, erected in 1818, had a silver 
bell cast of Mexican coins.  A new church was built on the same site in 1936.  
The night before the old church was to be moved and preserved by the Rondo 
Historical Society, it burned to the ground.  The silver bell could not be 
found.  The only explanation was that it "broke when it fell".
*********** 

Far from the Texians' bitter struggles on the battlefields of Goliad and San 
Jacinto lay the bustling town of RONDO, Arkansas.  In the spring of 1836 its 
citizens were not occupied with thoughts of the Texas war, but with the business 
and commerce of a developing community.

Today, a few miles from Texarkana, the village of Rondo lies quietly amid huge 
solemn oaks and rolling hills and fields, appearing to dream of its vivacious 
youth.  A stranger to the quant community would not know that if Rondo had not 
been a thriving center at one time, Texarkana would not have been born.

The War of 1812 was hardly over when the sturdy Anglo-Americans came on horseback, 
in carts, and afoot down Trammel Trace and Long's Trail to this luxuriant country.  
They dared the dangers of the wilderness and savage Indians to come from far away 
Virginia and upper and deep South and a few even from the Northeast.  They built 
a new and prosperous town on the very brink of civilization, gave it culture, and 
made it grow and develop into a thriving community.

The plantations and farms were scattered until 1835, when Alexander C. Owen, James 
S. Trigg, and Dr. Lewis T. Culley took steps to establish a town.  Owen selected a 
place for the cemetery, and Dr. Culley located the town a quarter of a mile north 
on the National Post Road, (Trammel Trace).  Because Trigg sold the land for the 
merchants' store lots, he was given the honor of naming the new town.  Trigg must 
have considered the chances of the frontier town's survival with uncertainty because 
he gave it the name Rondo, recalling a French game of chance called rondeau.

For years the odds against the residents of Rondo and Miller County were gambling 
odds indeed, since a person could not be sure, whether he or she was living in Mexico, 
Texas, or the United States.  Even by 1836, when Texas became a free nation and 
Arkansas acquired statehood, the inherited boundary confusion was no less chaotic.  

The Arkansas General Assembly in 1838 enacted a law making it a misdemeanor for 
Citizens of Miller County to hold office under the Republic of Texas, but the statute 
was never enforced.  In November of that year, Judge William Conway reported that he 
did not hold the Miller County term of court because county officials had made no 
provisions for it.  He also said that Texas had usurped Miller County, Arkansas, had 
divided it into the Texas Counties of Red River and Fannin, and had legislated their 
civil and military structure. 

In spite of such conflicts, Rondo became the largest town in the locality and a vital 
post on the way to the Southwest.  Less than four decades after the towns inception, 
however, all could see why Trigg's foreboding, when naming the town Rondo, was not 
unwarranted.  Rondo was withering.

The roaring, romantic railroads were kings in the Ark-La-Tex after the War Between the 
States. They could create new towns and kill old ones. Rondo, in Miller County, did 
not make out as well as some of the other communities. 

In the gentle undulated woodland four miles east of Texarkana the quiet village of 
Rondo reposes, appearing to the observer like and old man in a rocking chair puffing 
on a pipe of tobacco. Rondo shows no signs of having once been the commercial and 
cultural center of Miller County and southwest Arkansas decades before there was a 
Texarkana.  The Cairo and Fulton Railroad detoured Rondo and carried trainloads of 
new citizens and goods to Texarkana, hauling the cotton and raw products out.  The new community boomed, and Rondo withered.

Source: Pictorial History of Texarkana, Page 20/21, 
Chapter 1, The Birth of Twins; Page 32, Chapter 2, Adolescent Contention.

Submitted by: GVRichards@aol.com
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