Historical Marker
Calhoun County in the Civil War
Hampton, Calhoun County · Arkansas
Erected 2015
Henry Bunn was born in North Carolina in 1838, came to Calhoun County as a boy, and left Davidson College in 1861 to fight for the Confederacy. He was captured and wounded at Pea Ridge, wounded again in Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina, and left the army a colonel. After the war he practiced law in Camden, served in the state senate, and chaired the Bill of Rights committee at the 1874 constitutional convention. A justice of the state supreme court, he lost his seat to Joseph M. Hill in 1904, the first justice voted out since 1864.
Where it stands
33.53750, -92.47250 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Moro Bay State Park — 18 miA 117-acre park where Moro Bay and Raymond Lake meet the Ouachita River, home to the old Moro Bay Ferry, a cable ferry that ran from 1828 until bridges replaced it in 1992.
- Arkansas Museum of Natural Resources — 20 miA free state museum on the Smackover field, where a 112-foot derrick, a rebuilt 1920s boomtown street and working pumps tell how oil and bromine remade south Arkansas.
- McCollum-Chidester House Museum — 22 miAn 1847 Greek Revival house in Camden that served as a stagecoach headquarters and, in April 1864, as General Steele's headquarters, with bullet holes still visible upstairs.
- El Dorado Commercial Historic District — 25 miThe courthouse square and brick blocks of a town that jumped from 4,000 people to nearly 30,000 after the 1921 Busey well, listed on the National Register in 2003.