Poison Spring Battleground State Park

Union General Frederick Steele held Camden from April 15, 1864, and found it short of supplies. On April 17 he sent Colonel James M. Williams with over 600 men and 198 wagons to take corn from farms west of town. The column included the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry, a regiment recruited from formerly enslaved men from Arkansas and Missouri. On April 18, about 3,600 Confederate cavalry under Generals John Marmaduke and Samuel Maxey blocked the Camden-Washington road near Poison Spring. Colonel Tandy Walker's Choctaw Brigade from Indian Territory was among them. The 1st Kansas fought off two attacks, and a third by four brigades broke its line.

What followed is the reason this ground is remembered. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says that both Union and Confederate accounts agree that many Black soldiers of the 1st Kansas were killed after the battle was over, among them wounded and captured men, and reports from the field say some were killed while trying to surrender. Williams lost 301 men killed, wounded and missing, 117 of the dead and sixty-five of the wounded from the 1st Kansas, against Confederate losses believed to be fewer than 145. The defeat, with a similar one at Marks' Mills a week later, led Steele to abandon Camden on the night of April 26.

The state created the park in 1961 to keep a small part of the field. Outdoor exhibits and picnic sites sit along Highway 76, ten miles west of Camden, with a short trail through the pines. The park is one of three Camden Expedition sites in a National Historic Landmark.