Lakeport Plantation

Lakeport Plantation, southeast of Lake Village in Chicot County, holds the grandest surviving antebellum Greek Revival house in Arkansas. Joel Johnson of Kentucky founded the plantation about 1831 on the Mississippi River's American Bend. When he died in 1846 he owned more than 3,700 acres and ninety-five enslaved people. His eldest son, Lycurgus Johnson, built the seventeen-room house, largely of cypress, in 1858 or 1859, and by 1860 he held more than 4,400 acres and 155 enslaved people.

The Civil War left Chicot County devastated, but Lycurgus Johnson contracted with many of the people he had once enslaved, and in 1870 Lakeport led the county in cotton, with 600 bales. His son Victor sold it in 1927 to Sam Epstein, a Jewish immigrant from Russia who had started out as a clothing peddler. The family gave the house to Arkansas State University in 2001, and it opened as a museum on September 29, 2007.

The museum tells the story of the enslaved people who worked the land, of sharecropping, and of the Johnson family. Guided tours run on the hour, with self-guided tours also offered, and the commissary at the back still holds the goods locals could buy there into the 1980s. The museum's site advises avoiding the levee when using GPS.