Oldest Town Site in Arkansas

Davidsonville began as a purchase. When Lawrence County was created in 1815, its circuit court, meeting at Solomon Hewitt's house, was charged with choosing a seat, and it picked a spot near the Black, Spring and Current rivers and the only road in the area. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says the land cost $255 and came from five local French settlers, and surveyor James Boyd platted about 35 acres on the Black River's west bank. The town was first called Lawrence and had become Davidsonville by 1817. The land office opened in 1820.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Davidsonville Historic State Park — 0.3 mi
  The ghost-town site of Arkansas's first post office, courthouse and federal land office, on the Black River, with open-frame outlines of the courthouse and a dogtrot house.
• Powhatan Historic State Park — 6.1 mi
  A river port and county seat on the Black River whose 1888 courthouse, 1873 jail, log house and academy still stand where they were built, with a state archives branch in the same park.
• Crowley's Ridge State Park — 23 mi
  A 1933 state park on the loess hills of Crowley's Ridge, built around Benjamin Crowley's homestead spring and the stone-and-log pavilion, dam and cabins of the Civilian Conservation Corps.
• Arkansas State University Museum — 30 mi
  A free university museum in the Dean B. Ellis Library, with a mastodon cast, an Old Town Arkansas street, Native American and Rockabilly galleries and a tinkering studio, and the hub of the university heritage sites.

More markers nearby

• Camp Shaver — 8.0 mi
• Billy Lee Riley — 8.2 mi
• Randolph County Civil War Timeline — 8.6 mi
• General Sterling Price's Invasion of Missouri — 8.6 mi