Crowley's Ridge State Park

Crowley's Ridge State Park stands on the ridge that gave the park its name. Benjamin F. Crowley, a War of 1812 veteran and the first prominent white settler in the region, arrived in 1820 and chose the site for its high ground and a spring that still flows. His neighbors named the long line of hills for him, and he is buried in the park. The ridge is generally thought to be an island that the Mississippi and Ohio rivers once flowed around, and it is capped by wind-blown loess up to fifty feet deep, so its slopes are steep and its forest has beech, sugar maple and tuliptree, trees like those of the western Appalachians rather than the flat Delta around it.

The spot was a summer campground long before it was a park. Belle Hodges Wall of the Paragould Chamber of Commerce led the campaign, and the state accepted the land on July 21, 1933, as its fourth state park. In October the first Civilian Conservation Corps detachment arrived, mostly young men from northern Missouri, and grew to 207. They built trails, bridges, cabins, a pavilion and bathhouse, roads and a 300-foot earthen dam. About 8,000 people crowded the unfinished park on July 4, 1935, and it was dedicated on June 21, 1937.

The stone-and-log pavilion and bathhouse is still the focal point, and four CCC structures are on the National Register. The park is nine miles west of Paragould on US 412, then two miles south on Highway 168, with cabins, campsites, trails, a 31-acre fishing lake, summer swimming and kayak rentals.