[3] Newton County residents were divided during the Civil War, serving in both the Confederate and Union armies.

As an example of how the war divided families, Confederate Captain Cecil's brother, Sam, served as a sergeant in Union Company D, 2nd Regiment Arkansas Cavalry Volunteers.

Violence took a severe toll on the civilian population, and at one point, Captains McCoy and Vanderpool escorted 20 wagons of Unionist families from Newton County to Missouri to seek refuge.

The Buffalo National River, a popular destination for canoeing and recreation, runs through the county from west to east.

Native residents of Newton County were interviewed in 1970 for research being done by a doctoral student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

A Ph.D. degree was awarded to Bethany K. Dumas in May 1971 after she completed "A Study of the Dialect of Newton County, Arkansas."

Results are discussed in two of her published articles/chapters: "The Morphology of Newton County, Arkansas: An Exercise in Studying Ozark Dialect," Mid–South Folklore 3 (1975), 115–125, and "Southern Mountain English" Chapter 5 of The Workings of Language, ed.

The quorum court is the legislative branch of the county government and controls all spending and revenue collection.

This Republicanism resulted from their historical paucity of slaves, in turn created by infertile soils unsuitable for intensive cotton farming, and produced support for the Union during the Civil War.

[citation needed] These were the only two counties in Arkansas to be won by Alf Landon in 1936,[17] Wendell Willkie in 1940, Charles Evans Hughes in 1916, and even Calvin Coolidge in 1924.

Since the Civil War the only Democrats to gain an absolute majority of Newton County's vote have been Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and Jimmy Carter in 1976.

[22] Using difficulty ratings based on the Yosemite Decimal System, teams of two attempt to climb as many routes as possible in 24 hours.

However, the United States census does list Arkansas population based on townships (sometimes referred to as "county subdivisions" or "minor civil divisions").