Even after the county seat moved, the Jacob Wolf House remained a busy center of life in north Arkansas. After Arkansas became a state in 1836, settlers traveled along the White River into the interior, and thousands passed by this place, with some trading and others resting, helping Jacob Wolf's store and blacksmith shop prosper. A post office continued here until the Civil War, and the house served as a family home where many children were born, raised to adulthood, and married, along with grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. As a Baptist deacon, Wolf hosted camp meetings and denominational gatherings on the surrounding hillsides, and A. C. Jeffery wrote that Wolf had perhaps the largest household of kindred and friends of any man on White River. Jacob Wolf died in this house on January 1, 1863, at age 77. During the early settlement years, keelboats on the White River carried trade goods for merchants like Wolf and brought settlers coming to claim land in Arkansas. The front of the house faced the White River, where people arrived by canoe, keelboat, and later steamboat, and Wolf's oldest son captained the first steamboat to arrive here in 1834. Wolf also established a ferry across the river, and the landing site remains visible on the opposite bank. Circuit court sessions held here several times a year drew people from across the county for several days or longer, with families camping on the grounds, buying or bartering for goods, and men competing in shooting, wrestling, and tomahawk tosses. The house stood at an important location across the river from Shawnee villages in the Cherokee Reservation, at the head of steamboat navigation, near waterways usable by canoes and sometimes keelboats upstream, and where overland routes from the Buffalo River headwaters connected to Batesville and beyond. Archaeology has also shown that this upland terrace site was occupied repeatedly by small groups of people for many thousands of years, with layered flakes, artifacts, and projectile points found beneath the unplowed ground under the house at depths of 10 to 30 centimeters, and the differing styles of those points indicate that the groups who lived here were separated by many thousands of years.