Wild Haws in the Civil War

Wild Haws took its name from the haw trees at nearby Franklin, after the Post Office Department swapped the two names, and it became LaCrosse in 1869. The big cotton farms here ran on enslaved labor. The 1860 census listed 22 enslaved people held by the Watkins brothers, Tennessee-born settlers from 1845, and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas says enslaved workers hand-formed the bricks for the family's large house. LaCrosse later became home to Izard County's largest Black community, one of the largest in the rural Ozarks, until many families moved to Batesville in the 1930s and 1940s.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Calico Rock Historic District — 17 mi
  A one-block railroad-era Main Street climbing a hillside above the White River, rebuilt in brick and stone after the 1923 fire, with a hotel of homemade cement blocks.
• Blanchard Springs Caverns — 21 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.
• Ozark Folk Center State Park — 21 mi
  A state park of working craftspeople, a herb garden and live mountain music at Mountain View, born of a 1963 folk festival and a plan to pay for a sewer.
• Old Independence Regional Museum — 25 mi
  A Batesville museum in a 1936 WPA sandstone National Guard armory, telling the story of the twelve counties that once formed Independence County, with a research wing for local records.

More markers nearby

• Site of Lacrosse Collegiate Institute — steps away
• Izard County First Courthouse — 4.2 mi
• The Civil War in Sharp County — 12 mi
• Bushwhackers — 16 mi