Lewisburg in the Civil War

The war around Lewisburg was fought between neighbors. Jeff Williams, a Whig who opposed secession but defended slaveholders' rights and owned one enslaved person, led men hiding from Confederate conscription into the Union army in 1862. By September 1863 his independent company of scouts rode for the Third Arkansas Cavalry, garrisoned at Lewisburg, and spent about seventeen months fighting guerrillas led by Colonel Allen Witt, based near Quitman. Williams died on February 12, 1865, when about sixty of Witt's men surrounded his house near Center Ridge and shot him as he opened the door.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Museum of Automobiles — 8.7 mi
  Winthrop Rockefeller's 1964 museum on Petit Jean Mountain: a cable-roofed hall of antique cars, the only known Arkansas-built Climber, and vehicles once owned by Presidents and Elvis.
• Petit Jean State Park — 10 mi
  Arkansas's first state park, founded in 1923, with a Civilian Conservation Corps lodge, Cedar Falls and a Trail of Tears overlook on a canyon-cut mountain.
• Holla Bend National Wildlife Refuge — 20 mi
  A 7,000-acre refuge on an island of former farmland made when the Corps cut off a bend of the Arkansas River in 1954, with winter ducks, geese and eagles and a 14-mile auto tour.
• Pinnacle Mountain State Park — 25 mi
  A day-use state park west of Little Rock around a 1,011-foot Ouachita peak, with a strenuous summit trail, the Arkansas Arboretum and a visitor center above the Arkansas River.

More markers nearby

• Conway County Seat of Justice — 0.8 mi
• Conway County Cherokee Indian Boundary — 1.1 mi
• Murder of John Clayton — 4.2 mi
• Conway County in the Civil War — 4.2 mi