Early Railroads in Chicot County

The first railroad here nearly never got anywhere. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says the Mississippi, Ouachita and Red River, chartered to run from Gaines Landing toward Texas, had built only about seven miles when the war stopped construction, and that the Panic of 1873 caught it with about $2,040,000 in debt. Jay Gould's interests bought it at foreclosure in December 1874. It never got beyond Warren. Dermott's own entry says the line reached the town in 1872, and thirty-nine miles between Warren and Dermott still carry trains under the Arkansas Midland Railroad.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Japanese American Internment Museum — 7.3 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.
• Lake Chicot State Park — 17 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.
• Rohwer Relocation Center Memorial Cemetery — 19 mi
  A National Historic Landmark cemetery built by Japanese Americans incarcerated at Rohwer from 1942 to 1945, with monuments they made and audio panels narrated by George Takei.
• Lakeport Plantation — 25 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.

More markers nearby

• Chicot County Seats — 16 mi
• Columbia — 17 mi
• In Memoriam Hyner Cemetery — 18 mi
• Skirmish at Amos Bayou — 20 mi