Potts Tavern

The land under the Potts place was Cherokee until 1828. From 1817 to 1828 the Western Cherokee held a reservation in Arkansas, and after an 1828 treaty exchanged it for land to the west, Kirkbride Potts and the Logan brothers moved onto it. The settlement at Galla Rock became a river port. Potts bought his first 160 acres under his preemption right at 25 cents an acre and built up to about 650. He raised a two-level log house at the foot of Crow Mountain and lived in it about twenty-five years before the grander house went up.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Holla Bend National Wildlife Refuge — 6.5 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.
• Lake Dardanelle State Park — 9.1 mi
  A park on a 34,300-acre Arkansas River reservoir at Russellville, with aquarium exhibits and the story of the Norristown ferry crossing used in the removal of five nations.
• 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.
• Mount Nebo State Park — 12 mi
  Arkansas's second state park, on a flat-topped mesa above Dardanelle: a Victorian summer town, a town run by women in 1924, CCC cabins and a Trail of Tears view.

More markers nearby

• Butterfield's Overland Mail — steps away
• Potts Inn — steps away
• Potts Family in the Civil War — steps away
• Action at Dardanelle — 6.6 mi