Columbia

Columbia was a cotton port, and a hard-luck one. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says the Real Estate Bank branch opened in 1838, and when the state bank system failed in 1842 its local president, Sanford Faulkner, lost nearly $200,000. Martin Van Buren stopped there on April 22, 1842. The landing saw steamboat disasters and violence: the Rob Roy's boiler exploded upriver in 1836, killing at least 17, and on July 4, 1846, an enslaved man known as William was lynched in the town. The Mississippi eroded the site until it was gone, probably by the 1870s.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Chicot State Park — steps away
  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 — 8.3 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 — 21 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

• In Memoriam Hyner Cemetery — 1.5 mi
• Chicot County Seats — 5.7 mi
• Saunders-Pettit-Chapman-Cook Plantation Home — 7.3 mi
• Lakeport in the Civil War — 8.3 mi