Taylor's Creek and Mount Vernon

Taylor's Creek was the end of a raid. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says Col. Powell Clayton left Helena on May 6, 1863, with about 1,000 cavalry and three guns to destroy food and forage and to learn whether Price and Marmaduke planned a joint attack on the town. His men destroyed homes, farms and plantations in Phillips County and freed enslaved people they met. Col. Archibald Dobbins, ordered to attack from the west, never did, and Marmaduke criticized his commanders afterward, Dobbins above all. William Mitchell Taylor, who gave the creek its name, settled nearby in 1826.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Parkin Archeological State Park — 18 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.
• Southern Tenant Farmers Museum — 36 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.

More markers nearby

• Wittsburg in the Civil War — 8.7 mi
• Lee County — 25 mi
• Moro in the Civil War — 25 mi
• Prelude to Helena — 25 mi