Perry County Court House

The fire that matters came on December 20, 1881. That July, newspaper editor John L. W. Mathews was shot dead in his Perryville office after letters signed with the Ku Klux Klan's name told him and County Judge L. M. Harris to leave the county. The governor sent the Quapaw Guards, a Little Rock militia company, in August. In October a jury declined to convict ex-sheriff James Isom and William Payton. Two months later the courthouse burned, possibly to destroy records in the case. No one was ever convicted of the killing, the threats or the newspaper arson.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Museum of Automobiles — 9.9 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 — 11 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.
• Holla Bend National Wildlife Refuge — 20 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.
• Pinnacle Mountain State Park — 21 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.

More markers nearby

• Perry County in the Civil War — steps away
• Lewisburg in the Civil War — 10 mi
• Conway County Cherokee Indian Boundary — 11 mi
• Conway County Seat of Justice — 11 mi