Entries - County: Pike - Starting with D

Daisy is a town in Pike County, located on U.S. Highway 70 and on the shores of Lake Greeson. Daisy State Park is adjacent to the town of Daisy. The region that would become Pike County was sometimes visited by Caddo, although no permanent Native American settlements were established. Pike County was created in 1833, and in 1860 Henry J. Walston purchased land south of what would become Daisy, land that today is under the waters of Lake Greeson. Walston made additional land purchases in 1885, including the land where Daisy was established. Other families joined Walston, including the family of William Carroll Gentry, who homesteaded on Walston’s property. In 1888, a post office was established that was known as …

Daisy State Park is situated on the northern shoreline of 7,000-acre Lake Greeson in southwest Arkansas. The clear water and Ouachita Mountains scenery make the park a favorite of campers seeking water sports and fishing. Daisy is the eighth state park established in Arkansas. Lake Greeson was created in 1950 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers placed a dam on the Little Missouri River some six miles north of Murfreesboro (Pike County). The lake was created for flood control and hydroelectric power generation. The land for Daisy State Park, consisting of 272 acres, was acquired by the state and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on March 22, 1955. Former state representative Pete Austin, a lifetime resident of Pike …

  Delight is located in the southeast corner of Pike County. It was a center for the timber industry in the early twentieth century. White settlers began moving into the area near the end of the eighteenth century, settling along Wolf Creek, which flows from northwest of Delight in a southeasterly direction. The settlement became known as Wolf Creek and was granted a post office on January 18, 1832, and became a mail stop between Little Rock (Pulaski County) and the Hempstead County Courthouse, then at Washington. Samuel Hasley purchased about forty-three acres of land from the United States for $1.25 an acre. This acreage is now the town of Delight. Hasley later sold the property to Abner Hancock for …

Almost 100 million years ago, in what is now Pike County, nature created one of the world’s most unusual diamond-bearing formations, the big volcanic “pipe” that now serves as the centerpiece of Crater of Diamonds State Park. Famous today for recreational mining, the eroded old crater once inspired generations of diamond hunters to dream of commercial success. The history of that long quest—the expectations, the contention, and the repeated frustration—is, in itself, an invaluable legacy of the Arkansas diamond field. Unlike the typical diamond pipe, the formation in Pike County accumulated in various stages as molten rock deep within the earth’s mantle swept up through a shallower zone where diamonds had crystallized long before and then worked its way to …