The Ozark & Cherokee Central Railway was a rail line built from Fayetteville through the western part of Washington County to Oklahoma, connecting the mainline of the St. Louis & San Francisco Railway with agriculturally rich areas.
Such a line that connected the newly built was discussed by Fayetteville advocates as early as 1888.
A little more than decade later, in November 1899, the North Arkansas & Western Railway Co. was organized to that end. A route map and elevation chart between Fayetteville and Prairie Grove were produced in December 1899 for submission to the state of Arkansas.
The company then graded 12 miles of railroad bed before selling the operation to H.W. Seaman of Clinton, Iowa, and the Kenefick Construction Co. of Kansas City, Missouri, in February 1901.
They renamed the line as the Ozark & Cherokee Central and began laying rail while also surveying farther west. The line eventually ran from Fayetteville west through Farmington, Prairie Grove, Lincoln and Summers to the Oklahoma towns of Westville, Tahlequah, Muskogee and Okmulgee.
It started at the Frisco Depot on Dickson Street and briefly followed the earlier railbed of the Pacific & Greater Eastern Railroad south mostly along the present-day path of the Frisco Trail through the Lower Ramble. It then curled west after crossing present-day Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, went under the Frisco mainline near Rochier Heights and continued parallel to present-day MLK Boulevard until past the city limits.
In 1907, the O&CC was merged into Frisco, which continued to operate the line until 1942. A small depot for the railway company existed just south of present-day MLK Boulevard. A “dinkie” also used this rail right-of-way to take passengers between Dickson Street and the Washington County Fairgrounds when the fairgrounds were at the northwest corner of present-day MLK Boulevard and Razorback Road.
The section from Fort Gibson to the west side of Fayetteville was abandoned by Frisco in July 1942. When the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System was being built during the latter 1960s, the old O&CC bridge across the Arkansas River at Muskogee was removed. The remaining section of line in Fayetteville continued to be used as a spur serving lumber yards in southwest Fayetteville until the 1980s.
Today, a portion of the Tsalagi Trail from the Frisco Trail west to Razorback Road follows the old railroad bed.