Sevier County Seat of Justice

Paraclifta was a real town, not just a courthouse. Commissioners picked the site after the county's creation in 1828, a log courthouse went up for $150, and by 1850 fifteen families lived there. Four newspapers appeared in the 1850s and a seminary taught young women. Tradition says the name honors a Choctaw chief who settled a horse-theft dispute. In 1863 the town recruited a company of older men and boys, and Robert Gilliam, 44, one of its officers, died at Marks' Mills; his letters survive. The Gilliam-Norwood house, the county's oldest, is private.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beavers Bend State Park — 21 mi
  Pine and hardwood Ouachita hills where the Mountain Fork leaves Broken Bow Lake, a 1930s CCC park named for a Choctaw citizen, with trout water, a 26-mile ridge trail and the Forest Heritage Center.
• Millwood State Park — 32 mi
  A park at the foot of the 3.3-mile Millwood Dam, built in 1966 on the Little River, where flooded timber makes serious bass fishing and the lake counts as a bird-conservation area.

More markers nearby

• Sevier County in the Civil War — 12 mi
• Center Point — 23 mi
• Howard County in the Civil War — 23 mi
• Garland Cemetery — 23 mi