William N Barron

William Nelson Barron (December 7, 1859 – October 21, 1935) was a lawyer from Reading, Berkshire, England who settled in Poplar Bluff, Missouri in about 1894. In 1900, he became the plant manager and president of a factory that manufactured barrel staves and headers, known as the Brooklyn Cooperage Company after 1910, a subsidiary of the American Sugar Refining Company.

The unassembled barrels were shipped to Cuba and other sugar-producing countries. Barron oversaw the construction of the Butler County Railroad connecting Piggott, Arkansas to Poplar Bluff, Missouri, which was used primarily to haul lumber before being sold in 1928 to the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway. Barron named the towns along the railroad, which included:

Barron stated that he used Latin botanical names for the towns instead of the monotonous English tree names which were overused in Missouri. After exhausting the timber in the area, Barron became president of what would be called the Inter-River Drainage District, which drained thousands of acres of cut-over swamp land in Butler County, Missouri, by the construction of 200 miles (320 km) of ditches and 50 miles (80 km) of levees, starting in 1919.