Confederate Headquarters in Harrisburg

The Confederate general who set up headquarters here in April 1865, Meriwether Jefferson Thompson, had been mayor of St. Joseph, Missouri, from 1857 to 1860 and presided over the first Pony Express ride. Known as the Swamp Fox of the Confederacy, he fought in the Missouri State Guard, briefly commanded river rams in 1862 and led Shelby's Iron Brigade in 1864, though his requests for a Confederate general's rank were never granted. After the war he moved to New Orleans, returned to engineering work on Louisiana swamps and died of tuberculosis in 1876.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Arkansas State University Museum — 19 mi
  A free university museum in the Dean B. Ellis Library, with a mastodon cast, an Old Town Arkansas street, Native American and Rockabilly galleries and a tinkering studio, and the hub of the university heritage sites.
• Southern Tenant Farmers Museum — 21 mi
  A museum in the 1930s dry cleaner and filling station where leaders of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union met, telling the story of cotton tenancy and the Black and white union it produced.
• Parkin Archeological State Park — 22 mi
  A National Historic Landmark on the St. Francis River preserving a 17-acre Mississippian village, AD 1000 to 1550, that many archeologists think was Casqui in the Hernando de Soto accounts.

More markers nearby

• Poinsett County Court House — steps away
• Last Confederate Veteran — 16 mi
• Troops Raised in Craighead County — 18 mi
• Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church — 19 mi