Historic Washington State Park

Washington grew on the Southwest Trail, the road that linked St. Louis to Texas, and Hempstead County made Elijah Stuart's tavern its first seat of government in 1824. Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee people passed through on the removal to Indian Territory, and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas places the town on the Trail of Tears route from 1832 to 1838. Its blacksmith James Black reportedly made the first bowie knife for Jim Bowie in 1831, and a Washington newspaper attributed the knife to him in 1841.

The town's wealth came from cotton, and the Encyclopedia says many enslaved people worked here as household servants and in the fields around it. After the Civil War a Freedmen's Bureau office opened in Washington, and Archer Shepperson, who had been held in slavery, served in the Arkansas General Assembly in 1873 and 1874. In the fall of 1863 the Confederate state government fled Little Rock and met in the 1836 courthouse until 1865. Then the Cairo and Fulton Railroad bypassed the town in the 1870s and put its depot nine miles away, where Hope grew. Fires in 1875 and 1883 finished the business district, and the county seat moved to Hope in 1939.

That decline is why the buildings survived. The park opened in 1973 and holds fifty-four buildings on 101 acres, thirty of them historically significant. Start at the 1874 courthouse, which serves as the visitor center, then walk to the blacksmith shop, the weapons and print museums and the cemeteries. Williams Tavern serves lunch Tuesday to Sunday.