484. Van Buren, Crawford County (AR36)

I’m pretty sure this is the courthouse, Fort Smith withstanding. If it’s not the courthouse, it’s an old courthouse. For a while I suspected it was an old courthouse because it was only flying the US flag (and something else), not the Arkansas flag. It turned out there was a second flagpole with an Arkansas flag, so this is still the best candidate. The County Clerk’s Office is across the street and I often use that as a metric because the Clerk is usually at the courthouse or in very close proximity.

Of course, as I continued to take photos of monuments (another good metric), I became more and more sure that this was, in fact, the place, the actual courthouse. If it turns out that I was wrong and it’s actually another building, I’ve got to come back up to this area anyway when I go to Fayetteville and Bentonville (the true belly of the Walton beast), so I can fix it later. From a monumental perspective, there have been a number of Confederate memorials as I’ve been snapping photos, but to be honest, I just didn’t feel the mental wherewithal to deal with that. Some loads we don’t always have to bear if we don’t have to.

A block away from the courthouse in a courthouse parking lot, there used to be (I kid you not) a Chinese laundry a hundred years ago. The cache, a nano on a sign, was named in commemoration of that laundry, though not with the actual name because the CO, despite exhaustive research, couldn’t find the name of the place or its owner. My duty done here, I started moving again. I began to note that I had been to a lot of counties thus far, considering I hit Durant just after midnight. It was possible that I could match my best county day but first I had to arrive in…