Searcy County Seat

Three commissioners chose Marshall's hillside. In 1856 voters elected commissioners John H. Marshall, James W. Gray and Littleton Baker to find a new site, and they chose a bench of Devil's Backbone Mountain at Raccoon Springs; the Encyclopedia of Arkansas says their reasons for leaving Lebanon are unknown. The legislature approved it on December 31, 1856. The county itself is named for Richard Searcy, a circuit judge and major landowner who died in 1832, six years before it was created. The present courthouse dates from 1889 and joined the National Register in 1976.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Buffalo National River at Tyler Bend — 9.1 mi
  The country's first national river, kept free-flowing after a dam fight that ended in 1965, seen from the Middle District's visitor center, the Collier Homestead and the Riverview Trail.
• Rush Historic District — 16 mi
  The zinc-mining camp on Rush Creek that boomed from the 1880s, emptied after 1919 and now stands inside Buffalo National River as a ghost town.
• Blanchard Springs Caverns — 26 mi
  A living limestone cave in the Ozark National Forest, opened to the public in 1973 on a spring that once ran a Confederate veteran's gristmill.
• Jacob Wolf House — 28 mi
  Arkansas's oldest public structure, a two-story dogtrot log house at the Norfork confluence that served as the Izard County courthouse in 1829 and later as a family home.

More markers nearby

• Arkansas Peace Society — steps away
• Federal Raids on Burrowville — steps away
• Elton Britt — steps away
• Skirmish at Tomahawk — 13 mi