AUSTIN IN THE CIVIL WAR

In 1862 the prairie near Austin held a Confederate army camp of perhaps 20,000 men, first called Camp Hope. Soldiers from Texas and Arkansas gathered there, and in the summer men whose enlistments had expired mutinied over lack of pay; after the first group deserted, nine were executed. Measles, typhoid and mumps killed as many as 1,500 that fall. Allison Nelson, formerly colonel of the Tenth Texas, died of typhoid on October 7, days after his promotion to brigadier general, and the camp took his name. Veterans gathered the dead into a cemetery in 1905.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Plantation Agriculture Museum — 21 mi
  A 1912 brick store turned museum of cotton agriculture beside Horseshoe Lake, with a 1920s Munger gin and exhibits that run from slavery to sharecropping.
• Old State House Museum — 24 mi
  The oldest standing state capitol west of the Mississippi, where lawmakers met from 1836, enslaved people were auctioned in the east wing and Arkansas voted to secede.
• Plum Bayou Mounds Archeological State Park — 24 mi
  The Plum Bayou culture's mound center, A.D. 700 to 1050, formerly Toltec Mounds, with the tallest surviving prehistoric mounds in Arkansas and alignments to the solstices.
• Mosaic Templars Cultural Center — 24 mi
  The state museum of African American history on the site of the Mosaic Templars of America headquarters, a Black fraternal order's 1913 building on West Ninth Street.

More markers nearby

• Bayou Meto Historic Site — 11 mi
• Confederates at Bayou Meto — 12 mi
• Memphis Military Road — 12 mi
• Marmaduke-Walker Duel — 13 mi