Not From Around Here: War Eagle Arkansas 1850

Census 1850 War Eagle Township Arkansas

A close look at the War Eagle Township Census pages of 1860 shows the neighbors surrounding the Howertons  and the Lairds are people from from everywhere else.  Migrants all, excepting the youngest children. It appears that kids are generally the only folks born in the State of Arkansas.  The fact that Arkansas first called itself a state in 1836 could help account for this.

The Census records say the patriarch of the Laird family, Jacob Laird,  was born in Tennessee and Howerton patriarch, Ira Howerton was born in Virginia. These men were part of the wave of settlers coming west that swelled the population of Arkansas territory from about 1,000 to 200,000 in the span of fifty years.*  During the decade of the Laird / Howerton migration 1840-1850, the population of Arkansas approximately doubled from 97,000 to 200,000 plus people.  

Reading the birth place column of the 1850 census tells the origins of this flood of migrants into the Arkansas territory.  The Howertons and Lairds were surrounded by neighbors from everywhere else (but nobody born on foreign soil) including:

Tennessee

Alabama 

Arkansas

Kentucky

Louisiana

Mississipi

Virginia

Georgia

Ohio

Pennsylvania

Missouri

North Carolina 
South Carolina

(*Note: Native americans don't seem to be accounted for in these numbers, however. The government policy appears to be to move them off their native lands, out of the way of the white settlers, and to push them west into the "indian territories.") 

Source: Wikipedia Arkansas Historical Population:   source