General John Porter McCown

McCown finished tenth in his West Point class of 1840 and collected birds along the Rio Grande; a longspur named for him in 1851 was renamed the thick-billed longspur in 2020. He resigned from the U.S. Army in May 1861 and became a Confederate major general, fighting for a government founded to defend slavery. Critics accused him of drunkenness and abandoned supplies after he evacuated New Madrid in 1862. In March 1863 a court-martial found him guilty of disobeying orders at Murfreesboro and suspended him for six months. After the war he taught in Knoxville, then farmed.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Magnolia Square and the Columbia County Courthouse — 0.4 mi
  The 1906 courthouse and square at the center of a town founded in 1853, where oil came in 1922, Southern Arkansas University grew from a farm school, and Jordan Jameson was burned to death in 1919.
• Logoly State Park — 6.8 mi
  Arkansas's first environmental education state park, built on the Magnesia Springs resort and a Boy Scout camp, with about 200 acres of mature forest kept as a natural area.
• McCollum-Chidester House Museum — 32 mi
  An 1847 Greek Revival house in Camden that served as a stagecoach headquarters and, in April 1864, as General Steele's headquarters, with bullet holes still visible upstairs.

More markers nearby

• Calhoun Pioneer Settlement — 5.8 mi
• Lamartine Pioneer Settlement — 9.6 mi
• Mount Holly Cemetery — 17 mi
• Lafayette County Court House — 21 mi