Military Road

The road ran from St. Louis and Sainte Genevieve to the Red River valley. In Arkansas it passed through Pocahontas and Little Rock, forded the Ouachita River at Rockport, reached Washington and crossed the Red River at Fulton. The Army improved it under President Andrew Jackson, and by the 1830s more than 80 percent of the territory's population had come in by it. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says Midway was probably named for its place midway between Little Rock and Fulton. A stagecoach stop became the community's landmark in the nineteenth century.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• DeGray Lake Resort State Park — 11 mi
  A resort park on a 13,400-acre lake made when the Caddo River was dammed, with a lodge, a golf course and a paddle trail through the islets.
• Garvan Woodland Gardens — 13 mi
  A 210-acre botanical garden on a Lake Hamilton peninsula that one gardener built over thirty years and left to the University of Arkansas.
• Ouachita National Forest — 18 mi
  The oldest and largest national forest in the South, proclaimed in 1907 to protect shortleaf pine, with a supervisor's office in downtown Hot Springs.
• The Gangster Museum of America — 18 mi
  A Central Avenue museum on the years when Hot Springs ran an open gambling town, with Owney Madden, the Southern Club and the 1967 shutdown.

More markers nearby

• Settlement of Midway — steps away
• Confederate Manufacturing — 8.1 mi
• Military Road — 8.1 mi
• First Manufactory in Arkansas — 11 mi