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Lonsdale is a small incorporated town in eastern Garland County, about seventeen miles northeast of Hot Springs, and part of the Hot Springs Metropolitan Statistical Area.

The town is unusual in Arkansas for having been created single-handedly by a banker: John Gerdes Lonsdale Sr., a nationally known Hot Springs financier who was elected president of the American Bankers Association in 1930, organized the town around 1900 and named it for himself.

Lonsdale owed its founding to railroads rather than banking - as receiver and reorganizer of a bankrupt line, he helped create the Little Rock and Hot Springs Western Railroad and persuaded local families to grant the right-of-way, reportedly telling them, 'Give me room and I'll build you a town.'

The first train ran over the line on April 1, 1900, and on May 1 Lonsdale celebrated with an auction of seventy-five town lots, a free barbecue, square dancing, and a wedding of twin sisters on the auction platform; he also paid to bring electric lights and running water to the town.

Lonsdale incorporated on May 10, 1913, as a city of the second class, by which time it had two churches, a two-story schoolhouse, a movie house, general stores, and a timber economy anchored by the Pritchard-Collins Lumber Company, a stave mill, and a cotton gin.

On September 14, 1922, a fire started by a solderer's blowtorch in a garage swept through Lonsdale and destroyed twenty buildings - virtually the entire business district, including the three-story Homeplate Hotel, the town hall, the jail, and the post office - leaving forty people homeless.

In 1940, the founder's son, John Lonsdale Jr., built the Colony House, a miniature-Madison-Square-Garden-style entertainment center advertised as 'the South's Complete Entertainment Center,' and 10,000 to 15,000 people arrived by special trains for the Pioneer Day celebration held July 4-6, 1940.

After John Jr.'s death in a 1952 car accident, his mother gave land to the Arkansas Baptist Assembly in his memory, and the Baptists developed the Spring Lake Camp on the property in the 1960s.

Lonsdale's population peaked at 166 in the 1920 census, soon after incorporation, and the 2020 census counted just 103 residents in the roughly 0.4-square-mile town; the 2000 census had recorded 118 people in 49 households.

With its timber gone and both Highway 5 and Highway 70 built to bypass it, Lonsdale today functions as a bedroom community for Hot Springs, Benton, and Little Rock, with a ten-acre park, and its children attend schools in the Benton School District.