Editing Cabot, Arkansas (section)

=== Early history ===
The city of Cabot sprang up as a small settlement around a refueling station on the Cairo & Fulton Railroad after it bypassed Austin. The settlement first appeared in 1873 and is thought to have been named after railroad executive George Cabot Ward.{{Citation needed|date=August 2023}} The First Baptist Church was established in 1876, and the Cabot United Methodist Church in 1881. G. W. Grandberry began publication of the first newspaper in 1885, named "The Guard". Grandberry, along with James Milton Park served as the towns medical doctors.{{Citation needed|date=August 2023}} By 1889 businesses began growing alongside the railroad tracks. Businesses included six general stores, two drugstores, a hotel owned by James Charles Boyd, James Adam's livery stable, and the Neely brothers [[cotton gin]].<ref>Polston, Mike, and Debra Carrington Polston. Cabot. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2012.</ref> The Bank of Cabot (later merged into Centennial Bank) was founded in 1903. The city of Cabot was officially incorporated November 9, 1891, as the 139th city in Arkansas.

Cabot was often overshadowed in northern [[Lonoke County, Arkansas|Lonoke County]] by what at the time was the much larger city of Austin (originally named Oakland). However, Cabot experienced growth during the 1950s and 1960s, due to its proximity to the [[Little Rock Air Force Base]] in nearby [[Jacksonville, Arkansas|Jacksonville]] which opened in 1955, as well as due to the "[[white flight]]" occurring in response to the racial discord in [[Little Rock, Arkansas]] caused by school desegregation and its following [[Little Rock Nine|crisis]].<ref>Polston, Mike, ed. Bits and Pieces of Cabot History. Vol. 1. Cabot: Magee Publishing, 1988.</ref>