Troops Raised in Craighead County

Craighead County was not plantation country. The 1860 census counted 3,066 people, 87 of them enslaved, yet its men still raised Confederate companies, among them the Confederate Grays of the 13th Arkansas. The 2015 marker was sponsored in part by a Sons of Confederate Veterans camp and a United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter, groups that spread the Lost Cause account of a war fought for states' rights. The Confederacy these companies joined was formed to protect slavery. The only action in the county was a skirmish on Jonesboro's Court Square in August 1862.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Arkansas State University Museum — 2.0 mi
  A free university museum in the Dean B. Ellis Library, with a mastodon cast, an Old Town Arkansas street, Native American and Rockabilly galleries and a tinkering studio, and the hub of the university heritage sites.
• Crowley's Ridge State Park — 16 mi
  A 1933 state park on the loess hills of Crowley's Ridge, built around Benjamin Crowley's homestead spring and the stone-and-log pavilion, dam and cabins of the Civilian Conservation Corps.
• Powhatan Historic State Park — 29 mi
  A river port and county seat on the Black River whose 1888 courthouse, 1873 jail, log house and academy still stand where they were built, with a state archives branch in the same park.
• Southern Tenant Farmers Museum — 30 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

• Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church — 1.1 mi
• Craighead County Court House — 1.2 mi
• Last Confederate Veteran — 2.7 mi
• Confederate Headquarters in Harrisburg — 18 mi