Delta Cultural Center

The Delta Cultural Center is a state museum in downtown Helena. It opened in 1990 to preserve and interpret the heritage of a twenty-seven-county region of the Arkansas Delta, after the legislature created it through Act 109 of 1989 as part of the Department of Arkansas Heritage. Its main buildings stand a block apart: the Visitors Center at 141 Cherry Street and the restored 1912 Union Pacific depot at 95 Missouri Street.

The Visitors Center holds Delta Sounds, a gallery on the blues, gospel, country and rockabilly of the Delta, and it is the broadcast home of King Biscuit Time. KFFA radio first aired the program on November 21, 1941, and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas calls it the country's longest-running daily blues show. It is presented live at 12:15 p.m. on weekdays, so a visit is worth timing for midday. The depot carries two permanent exhibits, Heritage of Determination, which runs from prehistory to the present, and The Civil War in the Arkansas Delta, centered on the Battle of Helena on July 4, 1863. The National Park Service also lists the center among the Helena sites with exhibits on Indian Removal, when Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Chickasaw people passed the town by steamboat in the 1830s.

Admission is free, and the museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Moore-Hornor House, built in 1859, belongs to the center and looks out toward Graveyard Hill, one of the bloodiest places in the Battle of Helena.