Franklin County Court House

Ozark's courthouse has been rebuilt more than once. The first, a one-story frame building put up in 1840 on a $400 bid, replaced a schoolhouse without windows. The brick courthouse of 1851 became a fort in the Civil War: federal troops cut port-holes in its walls, and Confederates burned it after the Union soldiers left. The present building, designed by Frank Gibb in 1904 and 1905, lost its roof and second story to a fire on January 10, 1944, and was rebuilt in 1945. Charleston became a second seat in 1901 because crossing the river was hard.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wiederkehr Wine Cellars — 4.6 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.
• Subiaco Abbey — 17 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.
• Mount Magazine State Park — 25 mi
  Arkansas's highest point at 2,753 feet: a sandstone-rimmed plateau above the river valley with a lodge, overlooks and hang-glider launches.
• Devil's Den State Park — 31 mi
  A Civilian Conservation Corps park begun in October 1933 in the Lee Creek valley, with log-and-stone cabins, a 1937 stone dam, about sixty crevice caves and a 15-mile trail.

More markers nearby

• Skirmishes at Roseville — steps away
• Charleston High School Integration — 17 mi
• Clarksville in the Civil War — 20 mi
• First Anthracite Coal — 20 mi