Lafayette County Arkansas Landlord-Tenant Law: The Smallest County, the Cemetery on the Square, Maya Angelou’s Hometown, and the Coming Lithium Boom
There is no other courthouse square in Arkansas quite like the one in Lewisville. Most courthouse squares in the South have the obligatory Civil War monument, the old cannon, maybe a historical marker or two. The square in Lewisville, Arkansas, has a cemetery. The oldest tombstone on the grounds is dated March 9, 1860. A few feet away stands a marker for First Lt. Egbert B. Steele of the First Arkansas Cavalry, C.S.A., who died in November 1873. The county clerk’s office, the circuit clerk, the county judge, the sheriff, the assessor — they all work within sight of these stones. It is the only courthouse square in Arkansas that contains a cemetery, and this fact, strange and quiet as it is, captures something essential about Lafayette County: it is a place where history is not abstracted into museums but is simply present, underfoot, part of the daily landscape.
Lafayette County is the smallest county in Arkansas by land area — 545 square miles of pine timber, agricultural bottomland, and Red River country in the far southwest corner of the state. Its population of 6,308 makes it one of the least populous counties in the state. Its county seat, Lewisville, has fewer than 900 residents. And yet this tiny, quiet place has been touched by history in ways that would surprise any casual observer: it is the county where Arkansas’s first governor lived and is buried, the county where one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century spent her childhood, and the county that may be sitting on one of the largest concentrations of lithium in the United States. For landlords operating here, the market is small and deeply local — which makes thoroughness and professionalism not optional but essential.
James Conway, Arkansas’s First Governor
Lafayette County was the home of James Sevier Conway, who was elected Arkansas’s first governor in 1836 when the territory achieved statehood. Conway came from a Virginia family that had settled in what would become Lafayette County, where the family established a plantation that became one of the political and social anchors of early territorial Arkansas. When Conway died, he was buried on his property near what is now the community of Walnut Hill, about ten miles south of Lewisville. In 1984, the Conway family home site and cemetery were dedicated as Conway Cemetery State Park. The community of Bradley, near the park, celebrates this heritage each spring with the Governor Conway Days Festival — a two-day event on the last weekend of March featuring a parade, an antique car show, and a reunion of Bradley High School graduates. It is a modest celebration of a connection to the very founding of Arkansas as a state.
Maya Angelou and Stamps, Arkansas
The largest city in Lafayette County is Stamps, with a population of roughly 1,400 — and Stamps carries a literary significance that few American towns of any size can match. Maya Angelou, born in St. Louis in 1928, spent much of her childhood in Stamps, where she was raised by her paternal grandmother Annie Henderson and her uncle Willie. The Stamps of Angelou’s childhood was a rigidly segregated small Southern town where African American residents lived largely separate lives from white residents, operating their own churches, schools, and businesses within the Black community while navigating the daily humiliations and violence of Jim Crow. Angelou’s 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — one of the most widely read and taught American memoirs of the twentieth century — is substantially set in Stamps. The book’s depiction of the Store, the Henderson family’s general merchandise business on the main road through the Black side of Stamps, and of the community’s dignity and resilience under oppression, gave the world a portrait of rural Arkansas that was simultaneously devastating and deeply human.
In 2014, Stamps renamed its park in Angelou’s honor following her death. The town’s connection to one of America’s most beloved authors is a source of quiet pride in a community that has seen its population decline significantly from its mid-century peak. For landlords, Stamps represents a small rental market where the housing stock is old, the vacancy rate can be meaningful, and the tenant pool is drawn primarily from the county’s agricultural, timber, and limited commercial employment base.
The Lithium Discovery: What It Could Mean
Beneath Lafayette County, in the Smackover geological formation that runs across much of south Arkansas and into Louisiana, lies an extraordinary concentration of lithium-bearing brine. A 2022 report estimated that the lithium brine in this formation could contain sufficient lithium to produce batteries for 50 million electric vehicles, with total lithium content potentially ranging from 5 to 19 million tons. By 2025, results from exploration wells in the Lafayette County portion of the formation had found average lithium concentrations of 582 milligrams per liter — including the highest concentration yet reported in the entire Smackover formation. This is not theoretical. In 2023, Standard Lithium of Canada purchased 118 acres of timberland in Lafayette County and announced plans for a commercial lithium extraction and refinement plant, with an opening targeted for 2027.
If the Standard Lithium facility opens as planned and scales to the capacity its resource estimates suggest is possible, it could represent a transformative economic event for one of Arkansas’s smallest and most economically distressed counties. Industrial mineral extraction and processing at this scale would bring hundreds of jobs — construction workers, plant operators, engineers, maintenance personnel, administrative staff — to a county where significant employment has been scarce for decades. For landlords in Lafayette County, this development is worth monitoring closely. Demand for rental housing in Lewisville and Stamps could increase materially if the plant moves forward, and properties positioned to serve an incoming industrial workforce — clean, well-maintained, properly documented, and fairly priced — would be well situated to benefit.
The Timber Economy and Screening for Forest Industry Income
Much of Lafayette County’s land is owned and managed by large timber companies, most prominently International Paper, which constructed Lake Erling on the Bodcau Creek near Bradley around 1956 as part of its timberland management operations. The lake has since become a recreational asset jointly managed with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, offering public access for fishing, boating, and camping. Timber represents the largest single land use in the county, and forestry-related employment — from forest management and harvesting to trucking and small-scale wood products — supports a segment of the county’s workforce.
For tenant screening, the key distinction is between W-2 timber company employees (who can be screened using standard pay stub documentation) and independent contract loggers and harvesting crews (who work on per-job contracts with highly variable income and limited consistent documentation). For the latter group, requesting two full years of federal tax returns and evaluating net annual income is the appropriate standard. Avoid qualifying contract timber workers on peak-season earnings that cannot be sustained through a full lease year.
Arkansas Landlord-Tenant Law in Lafayette County
All residential rental relationships in Lafayette County are governed entirely by statewide Arkansas law. The governing statutes are A.C.A. §§ 18-16-101 through 18-16-108 and the Arkansas Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 2007, A.C.A. §§ 18-17-101 et seq. There is no local rent control, no just-cause eviction requirement, and no landlord licensing requirement anywhere in Lafayette County.
For nonpayment of rent, serve a written 3-day notice to vacate after rent is at least 5 days past due. For lease violations other than nonpayment, provide a 14-day written notice to cure or quit. Month-to-month tenancies require 30 days’ written notice to terminate; week-to-week require 7 days. Security deposits are capped at two months’ rent for landlords with six or more rental units and must be returned with written itemized deductions within 60 days of lease termination. Arkansas imposes no default implied warranty of habitability; tenants have no repair-and-deduct remedy. Abandoned property may be disposed of after lease termination. Self-help evictions are prohibited.
All evictions in Lafayette County are filed with Circuit Clerk Dana Phillips, #3 Courthouse Square, Lewisville, AR 71845, (870) 921-4878. Lafayette County is a dry county; no alcohol sales are permitted.
This guide is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Arkansas landlord-tenant law is governed by the Arkansas Code Annotated and applies statewide, with no local rent control or just-cause eviction requirements in Lafayette County. Consult a licensed Arkansas attorney or contact the 8th South Judicial Circuit Court Clerk at (870) 921-4878 for guidance specific to your situation. Last updated: March 2026.
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