Bear, Arkansas facts for kids

Bear, which was once called Bear City, is a small community in Garland County, Arkansas, United States. It's not a city with its own government, but a place where people live. Bear is located near Lake Ouachita, a big lake created when the Blakely Mountain Dam was built across the Ouachita River. Today, only a few people live in Bear, and it's surrounded by the beautiful Ouachita National Forest.

A Look Back in Time

For a while, until the early 1900s, Bear was actually part of Montgomery County, Arkansas. But then, officials decided to make the county lines straighter. So, Bear, along with two other places called Buckville and Cedar Glades, became part of Garland County.

The story of Bear City began in 1882 when a post office was opened there. At first, only a few families lived in the area, which was named after a nearby mountain called Bear Mountain.

In 1884, exciting rumors started spreading: people thought there was gold in the area! That same year, plans for a city were officially drawn up. By 1887, Bear City was booming. There were 35 companies trying to find gold. The city even had two newspapers, the Bear City Times and the Arkansas Mining Journal. At its busiest, Bear City had between 1,200 and 5,000 people.

Unfortunately for Bear City, the gold mining companies were not real. They were built on false hopes and scams. A geologist named John Casper Branner from the Arkansas Geological Survey discovered that the gold claims were fake. When he showed everyone the truth, the people of Bear City were very angry. They even burned a dummy of him! However, once the truth was out, most people realized there was no gold and moved away.

Bear then became a small, quiet community. A school was built there in 1906. Later, in 1930, a factory opened that made chairs and employed 12 people. Sometime in the 1940s, the school joined with the Lake Hamilton School District.