Commuting distance to Fayetteville or Fort Smith.  Just looking for general advice about what to expect from living in this area.  I was born and raised in TX...35 now, and summers as a kid I left the house at dawn with a 22 or 410 and didnt come back till dinner time.  That doesnt exist much in tx anymore.  Does that happen in nwa?  Im also done with the drought down here...makes it really hard to grow my own veggies...not to mention hunting land is difficult to find/overpopulated, or stupid expensive.  I have visited Fayetteville/west fork/winslow area and im relatively familiar with the area, so if there is somewhere specific I could raise my kids to be as free as i was, i'd love to hear it.

And as for taxes...if i move an rv onto land with water and electricity, but do a composting toilet is there some kind of tax that i would have to pay?  My parents have a place with a barn on it, and the plan is to park an rv in it and put back cash until we i can get my own piece of sod.

This all depends on how insulated you want to be from people.

You can find some cheap land between Fay and FSM, but it won't be developed to the point that you have water other than a well.  A lot of wells are not dependable.  You can get electric ran to a place by the power co. for free, probably.  School rides are pretty long to get to town, hard on the kids, I imagine.  Lot of dirt roads that are treacherous in the winter.  Not trying to sound negative, that's only if you want to be way out.  I live in Winslow area, and we are down 3 miles of dirt roads.  Never seen Googlecar.  But we farm and I like it that way.  Only leave the place once a week.  Pretty farms east of Winslow in community called "Sunset", and on up that road is a community called Health, AR.  You could just about disappear out there.  Only trouble is the commute.

Purchasing land around here can be a pain, because it's hard to find a place that has all the rights to it (timber, mineral, etc).  Sometimes there's access issues.  Western Washington Co. (Lincoln, Summers) may be better about that, and also Western Benton Co., but Benton's pop. has skyrocketed.  Only reason they haven't ran the hillbillies out and paved over the Boston Mountains is development needs water.  Northern Crawford Co. is pretty, too.  Town of Chester is right close to I-49.

As far as drought, it's not TX-level, but we're only 10 days away from one at any time.  Just across OK state line is level 1 drought.  You just have to collect water for your garden, or have a good well.

RV would be assessed as "personal property" taxable, no mobile home tax sticker as far as I know.  If you don't ever drive it around, you may not even have to pay that.

Also, no building code in Washington Co., Benton Co. has one.  You build whatever you want, whenever you want, in the way that you want.  But, you also shoulder the perils.

Depends on what you want to hunt.  There's a lot of land to public hunt but I swear that every idiot and there boyfriend decided to start duck hunting in the past 2 or 3 years and it is freaking ridiculous.  People get there at midnight, and it is crazy.
NWA is very nice and you can pretty much get out of town in a matter of minutes.
As I have heard from friends that live there, Everything as far as business growth is head North of Fayetteville.

That's good info!  How important is it to get mineral rights in ar?  In tx, if u have mineral rights is probably because your great great great grandfather left them to you. Almost unheard of.  Timber rights i understand...wouldnt want anyone cutting down all my trees.  Bus rides don't apply to homeschoolers;)  but i am looking into how ar regulates that also.

As far as hunting goes...I'm more of a harvester than a hunter...just wanna fill the freezer with venison.

Lots of deer.  I have a friend with a place in Newton County and they have so many that the county biologist issued a bunch of tags so they don't have blue tongue again.  However you may still have to rent a place but I would think that most people will let you come in and shoot some doe as they tend to over populate.

there is some nice places down 265 near hogeye
wesfork schools are ok but I hear prarie grove is better
Greenland is too close to the airport

I probably made mineral rights sound bad.  You can probably get by without owning them, but it is important to me to own it all.

Like you said, most minerals were sold in the 1800s from grandpap to get cash from whatever slickers were offering it.  When you do a title search, though, it's almost impossible to find out who has the deed, because the records disappeared through time, mostly during the war between the States.  I doubt you'd have some dude showing up with equipment and drilling in your pasture.  But, if you have a deed, you can surely lease and get a royalty to whatever is extracted.  And, you can legally fend off any slaphead that tries to invent a claim.

Timber rights are rarely sold, though, just something to make sure of.  You pay taxes on the timber if you own it.  Harvest it, or not.  Not a lot of money, we have like 100 in timber and the tax is $16 or so annual.

You are more likely to find a lot that has all the rights with it if you get a 160.  That's the size the gov't sold to settlers back in the day, when they had to prove them up.  The 40s are the subdivided from those original lots, and the grantors may have already sold the minerals by the time the lot was split.

I really don't know if water rights are an issue in the state of Arkansas.  Maybe in the delta.