Historical Marker
Ouachita County Ecore a-Fabre or Fabre's Bluff
Camden, Ouachita County · Arkansas
Erected 1936
Before Camden had a name it was Ecore a Fabri, a French trading post on a high bluff above the Ouachita River where the Caddo Trace crossed. In 1782 the Spanish governor sent Jean Baptiste Filhiol, called Don Juan, to set up a civil and military post for the Ouachita district. He started at the bluff and, after about two years, moved downriver to Prairie des Canots, now Monroe, Louisiana. Steamboats reached the landing in the 1820s, and in the 1850s as many as 40,000 bales of cotton shipped from its wharves in a single year.
Where it stands
33.58457, -92.83045 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- McCollum-Chidester House Museum — 0.7 miAn 1847 Greek Revival house in Camden that served as a stagecoach headquarters and, in April 1864, as General Steele's headquarters, with bullet holes still visible upstairs.
- Poison Spring Battleground State Park — 11 miAn 85-acre roadside battlefield west of Camden, where Confederates routed a Union foraging column on April 18, 1864, and many Black soldiers of the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry were killed after surrendering.
- White Oak Lake State Park — 17 miA 725-acre park on the lower of two 1961 lakes, where white sand marks an ancient shoreline and the visitor center carries a Poison Spring display eight miles from the battlefield.
- Arkansas Museum of Natural Resources — 18 miA free state museum on the Smackover field, where a 112-foot derrick, a rebuilt 1920s boomtown street and working pumps tell how oil and bromine remade south Arkansas.