Lakeport in the Civil War

Lakeport's war was Chicot County's war, and Chicot was overwhelmingly a county of the enslaved. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas counts 7,512 enslaved people there in 1860, more than 83 percent of the population. Foraging armies and partisan bands took what they needed, and a brutal guerrilla war ravaged the county. On June 6, 1864, after the fight at Old River Lake, Union troops filled Lake Village homes with wounded, looted and burned buildings, shot livestock and destroyed the newspaper office. The Freedmen's Bureau agent who praised Johnson, the encyclopedia notes, was not generally favorable to planters.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lakeport Plantation — steps away
  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.
• Lake Chicot State Park — 8.3 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.

More markers nearby

• Saunders-Pettit-Chapman-Cook Plantation Home — 5.4 mi
• In Memoriam Hyner Cemetery — 7.4 mi
• Columbia — 8.3 mi
• Chicot County Seats — 8.9 mi