Eberts Air Field World War I Training Site

Eberts Field opened in March 1918 on the prairie northwest of Lonoke, and its first unit, the 181st Aero Squadron, came from Kelly Field in Texas. Student pilots flew Curtiss Jennies, and the armistice arrived before the first class graduated. In June 1919 Lieutenant C. E. Johnson flew 300 copies of the Arkansas Gazette to Lonoke, the first newspaper delivered by airplane in Arkansas. The field closed that November and reopened in 1942 for contract glider training. Most of it is now flooded for a shrimp farm, with a row of concrete hangar foundations remaining.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Plantation Agriculture Museum — 13 mi
  A 1912 brick store turned museum of cotton agriculture beside Horseshoe Lake, with a 1920s Munger gin and exhibits that run from slavery to sharecropping.
• Plum Bayou Mounds Archeological State Park — 13 mi
  The Plum Bayou culture's mound center, A.D. 700 to 1050, formerly Toltec Mounds, with the tallest surviving prehistoric mounds in Arkansas and alignments to the solstices.
• Old State House Museum — 21 mi
  The oldest standing state capitol west of the Mississippi, where lawmakers met from 1836, enslaved people were auctioned in the east wing and Arkansas voted to secede.
• Mosaic Templars Cultural Center — 22 mi
  The state museum of African American history on the site of the Mosaic Templars of America headquarters, a Black fraternal order's 1913 building on West Ninth Street.

More markers nearby

• Senator Joe T. Robinson — steps away
• Action at Ashley's Station — 8.6 mi
• Memphis Military Road — 13 mi
• Confederates at Bayou Meto — 13 mi