A year earlier, American soldiers had erected a wooden stockade at the junction of the Arkansas and Poteau rivers and named it Fort Smith, after their commander. Schoolcraft was but 150 miles northeast of there, as the crow flies. Traces of that early fort still exist at the Fort Smith National Historic Site in Fort Smith, Ark.

“You can see the outline of the original stockade in the ground,” said Emily Lovick, museum technician. The stockade itself is long gone. The earliest building still standing at the site is the commissary, which dates to the 1830s.

“It’s a beautiful old stone building,” she said.

‘Crown jewel’

There are at least two homes in the Ozarks from the 1820s, according to Mark Christ, spokesman for the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program.

The Rice-Upshaw House, in Dalton, Ark., southeast of West Plains, was built around 1826. According to the National Register, it “is one of the two oldest remaining standing buildings in Arkansas, and a rare surviving example of a building from Arkansas’ territorial period.”

The other home from the same period is the Wolf House, built on a hill overlooking the junction of the Norfork and White rivers. Its construction date is listed as “circa 1825,” according to the National Register.

Neither house is currently open, although they both could be in the future. Volunteers are restoring the Rice-Upshaw House. Nancy Wolf, great-great-great-granddaughter of Jacob Wolf, the man who built the Wolf House, said there is a proposal to add it to the National Park Service.

It also is a two-story dogtrot, and the overlook and home have both been restored with the aid of more than $665,000 in grants, Wolf said.

“The Wolf House, of course, is the crown jewel,” said Christ, when asked about early Ozarks homes.

Both houses and other early Ozarks log homes can be dated by examining and comparing tree rings in the logs.

Houses from the 1830s, while still rare, are more common.

The Hornback Cabin, at Carthage, may date to the 1830s. The late Bob Sheldon, who owned the nearby Old Cabin Shop, and Steve Weldon, Jasper County archivist, both put the date sometime in the 1830s.

“It is the oldest surviving building in the county,” Weldon said. “That is where the first county court was held. It was outside the cabin, under the trees.”

That first court session took place in 1841.