Little Rock & Central Arkansas

A day-use state park west of Little Rock around a 1,011-foot Ouachita peak, with a strenuous summit trail, the Arkansas Arboretum and a visitor center above the Arkansas River.

The Corps of Engineers dam on the Little Red River that President Kennedy dedicated on October 3, 1963, with a visitor center, a trout hatchery below the dam and a lake of 340 miles of shoreline.

The site of Arkansas's first European trading post, opened in 1686 beside the Quapaw town of Osotouy, later a territorial capital and the scene of a January 1863 Union victory.

The 1927 high school where nine Black students entered under federal troops on September 25, 1957, with a National Park Service visitor center across the intersection.

The oldest standing state capitol west of the Mississippi, where lawmakers met from 1836, enslaved people were auctioned in the east wing and Arkansas voted to secede.

The state museum of African American history on the site of the Mosaic Templars of America headquarters, a Black fraternal order's 1913 building on West Ninth Street.

The Plum Bayou culture's mound center, A.D. 700 to 1050, formerly Toltec Mounds, with the tallest surviving prehistoric mounds in Arkansas and alignments to the solstices.

The neo-classical Capitol built from 1899 to 1915 on the old penitentiary site with state convict labor, free to enter, with the Little Rock Nine monument on the grounds.

A 1912 brick store turned museum of cotton agriculture beside Horseshoe Lake, with a 1920s Munger gin and exhibits that run from slavery to sharecropping.

A 14-foot-wide walking and cycling bridge built onto Murray Lock and Dam, 90 feet over the Arkansas River between Little Rock and North Little Rock.