Memphis Military Road

Congress authorized the Memphis to Little Rock road on January 31, 1824, and the Army supervised its building, which is why Arkansas called it a Military Road. Specifications asked for a clearing at least twenty-four feet wide, with swamps causewayed in poles or split timber. Surveyors Joseph Paxton and Thomas Mathers laid it out with contractor Anderson Carr, who resigned over where to cross the White River. The road ran over swamp, Crowley's Ridge and the Grand Prairie, and in the 1830s Choctaw, Muscogee, Cherokee and Chickasaw people forced from their homelands traveled it toward Indian Territory.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Plantation Agriculture Museum — 11 mi
  A 1912 brick store turned museum of cotton agriculture beside Horseshoe Lake, with a 1920s Munger gin and exhibits that run from slavery to sharecropping.
• Old State House Museum — 12 mi
  The oldest standing state capitol west of the Mississippi, where lawmakers met from 1836, enslaved people were auctioned in the east wing and Arkansas voted to secede.
• Mosaic Templars Cultural Center — 12 mi
  The state museum of African American history on the site of the Mosaic Templars of America headquarters, a Black fraternal order's 1913 building on West Ninth Street.
• Arkansas State Capitol — 12 mi
  The neo-classical Capitol built from 1899 to 1915 on the old penitentiary site with state convict labor, free to enter, with the Little Rock Nine monument on the grounds.

More markers nearby

• Confederates at Bayou Meto — 0.9 mi
• Marmaduke-Walker Duel — 0.9 mi
• Bayou Meto Historic Site — 2.0 mi
• Marmaduke-Walker Duel — 9.1 mi