Saunders-Pettit-Chapman-Cook Plantation Home

Ditch Bayou was a fight over a bayou the Union officers did not know was there. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says about 6,000 men under A. J. Smith landed near the southern tip of Lake Chicot on June 5, 1864, and on June 6 Confederate skirmishers withdrew across Ditch Bayou and destroyed the only bridge. Union officers ordered troops across what they took for open ground, and hidden artillery pinned them down. Col. Colton Greene, with about 800 men and ten guns, withdrew at 2:30 p.m. Union losses were 131 against 37 Confederate.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lakeport Plantation — 5.4 mi
  Arkansas's grandest surviving Greek Revival plantation house, built about 1858 by a planter who held 155 enslaved people in 1860, now an Arkansas State University museum.
• Lake Chicot State Park — 7.2 mi
  A state park on the largest natural lake in Arkansas, a 20-mile oxbow of the Mississippi River that was cleaned up and reopened after decades of silt.
• Japanese American Internment Museum — 26 mi
  A museum in the McGehee train depot on the two Arkansas camps, Rohwer and Jerome, where about 16,000 Japanese Americans were held from 1942 to 1945.

More markers nearby

• Chicot County Seats — 4.4 mi
• Lakeport in the Civil War — 5.4 mi
• In Memoriam Hyner Cemetery — 5.7 mi
• Columbia — 7.3 mi