Before the highway system became numbered and federalized in the late 1920s, associations of communities and states began organizing in the 1910s to create their own connecting highways. One such highway was the Jefferson Highway, the first north-south transcontinental highway in America, connecting Winnipeg, Canada, with New Orleans, Louisiana.
When the Jefferson Highway Association was being formed in 1914, some residents in Northwest Arkansas expressed strong interest in becoming part of the association, but the state of Arkansas refused to join.
As a result, the initial highway route came down the border of Missouri and Kansas, crossed into Oklahoma, Texas and then back into Louisiana, bypassing Arkansas.
By the mid-1920s, Arkansas finally joined the association, and a route approximating today’s U.S. 71 was improved to become Arkansas’s portion of the Jefferson Highway.
Through Fayetteville, the Jefferson Highway followed College Avenue from the north to Center Street, east to School Avenue and south to the city limits.
Existing named highways were converted to numbered highways about 1926. The portion of the Jefferson Highway along the western side of Arkansas were number U.S. 71.
A portion of the original concrete highway — the “slab” as it was often called — remains in service south of Greenland at Baptist Ford, paralleling a newer stretch of the highway that crossed over a newer bridge.
The old section was added to the National Register of Historic Places.