Perry County in the Civil War

Perry County split along its hills. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says the mountainous west leaned Unionist while the east, where most enslaved people lived, leaned Confederate, and it quotes the traveler Friedrich Gerstacker describing a countryside ravaged by Jayhawkers, Union soldiers and outlaws. On December 1, 1864, Captain Marvin Gates and two men of the Third Arkansas Cavalry found five guerrillas at Cypress Creek, about nine miles from Lewisburg. Gates charged and was killed, and none of the five escaped. Colonel Abraham Ryan's report is the only surviving account.

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