Plantation Agriculture Museum

Conoway Scott Jr. built the large brick building in 1912 as a general store, though neither he nor his heirs ran it, and a post office wing followed in 1929. Robert L. Dortch and his daughter Floride Dortch Rebsamen bought it in the 1960s and turned it into a museum. It closed in 1978 and reopened on June 25, 1989, under the state parks department, with a mission to interpret the history of cotton agriculture, with an emphasis on plantations.

The story it tells runs from enslaved people to sharecroppers to plantation owners. By 1862 the Scott family owned 2,000 acres and ten enslaved people, and Scott's Station on the Cotton Belt line later gave the town its name. Exhibits follow cotton from the field to the gin. The Dortch gin building holds a 1920s Munger cotton gin and press assembled in its original arrangement, and the Dortch seed warehouse was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2010. The collection numbers more than 10,000 artifacts, including two large steam traction engines.

The museum is at 4815 Highway 161 South in Scott, beside Horseshoe Lake and about twenty miles southeast of Little Rock. It is open Wednesday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. It is closed Monday and Tuesday and on New Year's Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, with interpretive programs year round. The park lists no admission fee.