Murder of John Clayton

No killer of John M. Clayton was ever identified. He was shot through the window of his Plumerville boardinghouse on January 29, 1889, and a $5,000 reward, Pinkerton detectives and a U.S. House inquiry turned up no one. Joseph W. Smith, a Black man hired for the investigation, was shot dead a mile north of town on March 30. In 1890 the House ruled that Clayton had won the 1888 election. Black voters in Howard Township were a Republican bloc, and from 1890 to 1892 more than 1,500 people in south Conway County applied to emigrate to Liberia.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Museum of Automobiles — 13 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 — 15 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.
• Pinnacle Mountain State Park — 24 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.
• Holla Bend National Wildlife Refuge — 24 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.

More markers nearby

• Conway County in the Civil War — steps away
• Lewisburg in the Civil War — 4.2 mi
• Conway County Seat of Justice — 4.6 mi
• Conway County Cherokee Indian Boundary — 4.9 mi