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Colonel Maurice Smith encouraged his kin to come to Tulip and many did. For generations the Smiths had been wealthy planters in North Carolina. Colonel Smith had served in the North Carolina Senate in the years 1828-29, as his father had done twenty-five years before. The Smiths were cultured people, accustomed to the niceties of life, and with their stubborn will had accomplished much good for themselves and others. Several of the kin came to look Dallas county over and found, as Reverend J. E. Caldwell wrote in 1907:

"I hesitate not to say that Tulip Ridge . . . healthfulness of climate, beauty of forest . . . was second to no place in this or any other state."

In 1845, Samuel Webb Smith, of Granville County, North Carolina, and Dr. Lewis Downey Cooper, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, first cousins to the Colonel, came to Tulip and decided to make their permanent homes there. Samuel W. Smith went back to North Carolina and when he returned to Arkansas he had to pay toll tax on a bridge that his own slaves had built on the previous trip. In 1848, Judge Willis L. Somervell and General Nathaniel G. Smith (no kin to Colonel Smith) came from Hardeman County, Tennessee, and were followed by their brother-in-law, Samuel Harrison Smith (brother of Col. Smith), in 1849. In July, 1854, Major Thomas Reid (brother-in-law of Colonel Smith) completed the emigration of the family to Tulip. These people, combining their fortunes, were soon to come into prominence in Arkansas.

Reverend John Rayor, a Methodist minister, had opened a little school for Tulip children in the 1840 's. In the winter of 1850 several interested citizens of Tulip chartered the Arkansas Military Institute and the Tulip Female Seminary. The names of those incorporators were: Colonel Maurice Smith, General Nathaniel G. Smith, Judge W. L. Somervell, Major George C. Eaton, J. J. Samuel, Dr. William Bethel, Samuel H. Smith, Major B. J. Borden, and Hector McNeill.

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