Chicot County Seats

The county seat has moved four times, mostly forced by the river. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says Villemont, founded in 1822, washed into the Mississippi by 1847, and Columbia was eroded away too, while Masona was a temporary inland seat with no permanent buildings. Lake Village has held the title since 1857. Its first courthouse was demolished in 1907, and a buff-brick successor was razed in 1956. The present Art Deco courthouse, built that year on land donated by planter John Sumner, was designed by Herbert Voelker, whose only Arkansas building it is.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Chicot State Park — 5.7 mi
  A state park on the largest natural lake in Arkansas, a 20-mile oxbow of the Mississippi River that was cleaned up and reopened after decades of silt.
• Lakeport Plantation — 8.9 mi
  Arkansas's grandest surviving Greek Revival plantation house, built about 1858 by a planter who held 155 enslaved people in 1860, now an Arkansas State University museum.
• Japanese American Internment Museum — 22 mi
  A museum in the McGehee train depot on the two Arkansas camps, Rohwer and Jerome, where about 16,000 Japanese Americans were held from 1942 to 1945.

More markers nearby

• Saunders-Pettit-Chapman-Cook Plantation Home — 4.4 mi
• In Memoriam Hyner Cemetery — 4.4 mi
• Columbia — 5.7 mi
• Lakeport in the Civil War — 8.9 mi