Herman Davis State Park is a one-acre site at Highway 18B and Baltimore Street in Manila, around the grave of a local hunting guide. Davis was born on January 3, 1888, on Big Lake Island, which became Manila, and left school after the fourth grade to help his family. He guided hunters and, before federal game limits, killed as many as 400 ducks a day with his cousin. The Army at first rejected him for his height, 5 feet 3 inches, and then drafted him on March 4, 1918. As a scout with Company I of the 113th Infantry, he crawled to within fifty yards of a German machine gun near Verdun and killed its four gunners.
General Pershing listed him fourth among the war's 100 greatest heroes. He received the Distinguished Service Cross and two French Croix de Guerre, and the Médaille Militaire. He told no one about any of it until his friends learned from the list and made him show his medals, which he kept in a tackle box. Poison gas had given him tuberculosis, and he died in a Memphis veterans' hospital during surgery on January 5, 1923.
Schoolchildren across Arkansas held a pennies drive for the monument, a 25-foot granite obelisk with a marble figure at its base, dedicated on Memorial Day, 1925. Davis was reburied at its foot. The state made it a park in 1953, and it joined the National Register in 1995. The city does the upkeep.
The closest stops worth working into your route