Poinsett County Court House

Poinsett County took its name from Joel Roberts Poinsett, a South Carolinian who was the first U.S. minister to Mexico and the reason the Christmas poinsettia has its name. He saw the plant near Taxco in the late 1820s and sent samples home. The county was formed on February 28, 1838, while he was Van Buren's Secretary of War, a post in which he oversaw the forced removal of Native nations from their lands, the Trail of Tears. His war department also presided over the Seminole War and territorial seizures west of the Mississippi.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Arkansas State University Museum — 19 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.
• Southern Tenant Farmers Museum — 21 mi
  A museum in the 1930s dry cleaner and filling station where leaders of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union met, telling the story of cotton tenancy and the Black and white union it produced.
• Parkin Archeological State Park — 22 mi
  A National Historic Landmark on the St. Francis River preserving a 17-acre Mississippian village, AD 1000 to 1550, that many archeologists think was Casqui in the Hernando de Soto accounts.

More markers nearby

• Confederate Headquarters in Harrisburg — steps away
• Last Confederate Veteran — 16 mi
• Troops Raised in Craighead County — 18 mi
• Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church — 19 mi