Lamartine Pioneer Settlement

Colonel John Dockery, a New Orleans cotton broker, reportedly swapped notes for more than 1,000 acres and the enslaved people on them around 1850. By 1860 only five other landowners in the county held more slave property than he did. He named the place for the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine and in 1851 chartered a railroad meant to join the Mississippi and Red rivers, serving as its first president; the investment collapsed in 1858. In 1883 a different railroad passed three and a half miles south, and the post office and most residents moved to Waldo.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Logoly State Park — 6.9 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.
• Magnolia Square and the Columbia County Courthouse — 9.2 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.
• Poison Spring Battleground State Park — 24 mi
  An 85-acre roadside battlefield west of Camden, where Confederates routed a Union foraging column on April 18, 1864, and many Black soldiers of the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry were killed after surrendering.
• White Oak Lake State Park — 24 mi
  A 725-acre park on the lower of two 1961 lakes, where white sand marks an ancient shoreline and the visitor center carries a Poison Spring display eight miles from the battlefield.

More markers nearby

• General John Porter McCown — 9.6 mi
• Calhoun Pioneer Settlement — 14 mi
• Lafayette County Court House — 17 mi
• Mount Holly Cemetery — 21 mi