Powhatan Historic State Park

Powhatan Historic State Park keeps a small port town on the Black River where it was, with its buildings on their original ground. John Ficklin was running a ferry here by 1820, and the steamboat Laurel is said to have landed around 1829. The settlement took the name Powhatan in 1837, and in 1869 it became the Lawrence County seat, moved from Clover Bend. The first courthouse opened in 1873 and burned in 1885. The courthouse built in 1888 on a rise above the river still stands, with the 1873 limestone jail, the 1840s Ficklin-Imboden Log House and the 1890 Male and Female Academy.

Powhatan faded when the railroad passed it by in the early 1880s and Black Rock grew up on the tracks. In 1887 a mob of about twenty-five hanged Andrew Springer, a white man accused of rape, from a tree outside town. Voters moved the county government to Walnut Ridge on August 27, 1963, and the Lawrence County Historical Society saved the courthouse and its records. The state took the property in 1979.

The courthouse holds a free museum on the town and county, and guides take visitors through the other buildings. The Northeast Arkansas Regional Archives, a branch of the state archives, keeps records from sixteen counties here and is open to researchers. The park is on Highway 25, within about 15 miles of Davidsonville and Lake Charles.