166 Arkansas businesses have survived more than a century.

IN JANUARY, ARKANSAS Business began a modest project to catalog businesses that have been operating in this state for 75 years or longer.

How many could there be, anyway? Fifty? Maybe 75?

It was evident almost immediately that we would have to limit our list to companies that have been part of the Arkansas landscape for at least 100 years. And we had to make some blatantly subjective decisions: We did include private, nonprofit organizations like hospitals and private colleges, but we didn't include government-sponsored institutions like the University of Arkansas (founded 1871) or the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (1879).

We didn't include companies that were founded outside of the state and then branched into it--not even SBC Communications of San Antonio, parent of Southwestern Bell Telephone Co., which has operated in Arkansas for 125 years. We didn't include banks with 100-plus-year histories if they no longer have their original charter, like U.S. Bank of North Little Rock, which is now part of a regional bank chartered in Cincinnati.

We did, however, include homegrown companies that are now owned by non-Arkansas companies if they continue to be operated as independent business units, like 142-year-old Coleman Dairy (now owned by Tennessee-based Turner Holdings) and 102-year-old M.M. Cohn (owned by The Dunlap Co. of Fort Worth, Texas, since 1989).

Still, we ended up with a list of 166 businesses and private institutions and no assurance that we haven't missed many more.

The oldest business in Arkansas was no surprise: Rose Law Firm, founded in 1820. A brief history of the firm is included in the Arkansas Business 20 special publication delivered with this issue, as part of a feature on "Hanging Judge" Isaac Parker.

But there were lots of surprises. For instance, Berryville (population 4,500) and Camden (population 13,000) each claim two companies ranked among the 15 oldest in the state. Features on those companies appear on Pages 16-18.

Another surprise was the number of newspapers--25 dailies and 45 weeklies or semi-weeklies--on the list. Of course, the end of the 19th century was a time of rapid expansion in the newspaper industry; a list of newspapers that have died would be much, much longer

The next biggest category of centennial companies are commercial banks--33 of them. While their names and holding companies may have changed, the banks on our list still maintain their charters from 1904 or earlier. The oldest is Arvest Bank of Fayetteville, owned by the Walton family of Bentonville, which deliberately retained the 1871 charter originally known as McIlroy Bank & Trust when its bank holdings in three states were collapsed into a single charter.