First Anthracite Coal

Coal turned up on a Spadra Creek outcrop in 1840, and the first attempt to ship it ended badly: eleven barges bound for Louisiana sank in high water. Barges carried coal to Little Rock by 1843, but mining paid only after the railroad reached Clarksville in 1873. By 1880 Johnson County supplied about 80 percent of Arkansas coal. Arkansas mines used convicts at first, then immigrants from central Europe, and two of the three strikes reported for 1881 to 1886 happened at Spadra. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas calls the eastern end of the field semianthracite.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Subiaco Abbey — 15 mi
  A Benedictine monastery on a hilltop in Logan County, founded in 1878 for German-speaking Catholic settlers, with a 1959 abbey church and a boarding school for boys.
• Wiederkehr Wine Cellars — 16 mi
  The oldest operating winery in Arkansas, begun in 1880 in a hand-dug cellar on St. Mary's Mountain by a Swiss shoemaker, in the village that grew around it.
• Lake Dardanelle State Park — 20 mi
  A park on a 34,300-acre Arkansas River reservoir at Russellville, with aquarium exhibits and the story of the Norristown ferry crossing used in the removal of five nations.
• Mount Nebo State Park — 21 mi
  Arkansas's second state park, on a flat-topped mesa above Dardanelle: a Victorian summer town, a town run by women in 1924, CCC cabins and a Trail of Tears view.

More markers nearby

• Clarksville in the Civil War — steps away
• Skirmishes at Roseville — 20 mi
• Pope County The County Seat — 20 mi
• Franklin County Court House — 20 mi