In south Fayetteville, the junction of the Fayetteville & Little Rock Railroad (better known as the St. Paul Branch) with the main line of St. Louis & San Francisco Railway (Frisco) became known as Fayette Junction.
The switch was added on Dec. 4, 1886, just four years after the first regularly scheduled train had passed through Fayetteville.
A 1918 Valuation Survey of the Interstate Commerce Commission listed the following structures at Fayette Junction:
- Depot 1 consisted of three 9-foot by 34-foot car bodies, Sanborn 1913
- Depot 2 was a one-story brick building with a wood platform
- Foreman’s office, a one-story frame building
- Machine shop, 20 feet by 20 feet
- Supply house, 9 feet by 34 feet car body
- Fuel oil tank
- Car repair tool house, 8 feet by 12 feet
- Scrap box
- Locker house, 9 feet by 34 feet
- Cinder pit, 11.5 feet by 102.6 feet. The cinder pit had two tracks
- 150-ton balance bucket coaling tower (built 1909)
- Scale, 40-foot long with capacity of 100 tons (built 1907)
- Water tank, wood, 12 feet above the ground with circumference of 30 feet
- Wye (the junction had two rail connections to the mainline, shaped like a wye, allowing the eastbound train to go north or south onto the mainline)
The junction became a hotbed of manufacturing interests in the latter 19th and early 20 centuries due timber being hauled out of the Boston Mountains and brought to Fayetteville to be turned into finished products or shipped to other rail lines as railway ties.
Today, the wye of the junction is still visible in aerial photos just northeast of the intersection of Cato Springs Road and Vale Avenue.