State Parks

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Entry Category: State Parks

Powhatan Historic State Park

Powhatan Historic State Park preserves a small nineteenth-century river port town in Lawrence County, once a hub of northeast Arkansas commerce, industry, and government. Located on the Black River at the juncture of the Ozark Plateau and the Arkansas Delta, Powhatan pioneers had the advantages of easy river access, plentiful resources in the foothills, and fertile land. The first steamboat, the Laurel, arrived around 1829, beginning a series of landings that spanned over 100 years and stimulated civic and regional growth. Footpaths transformed into roads, a river ford into a ferry, and swampy delta into rich farmland, attracting merchants, farmers, and families. In 1837, the settlement name “Powhatan” was selected to honor the Virginia Native American chief, father of Pocahontas. …

Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park

Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park preserves the site of the Civil War Battle of Prairie Grove in northwest Arkansas. Established in 1908 as a park where old veterans held reunions, it became a state park to help visitors understand the battle and its place in Civil War history as well as how the war changed the lives of the civilians in the Arkansas Ozarks. The Battle of Prairie Grove on December 7, 1862, was the last time two major armies of almost equal strength faced each other for supremacy in northwest Arkansas. The Confederate army withdrew from Prairie Grove on the night of December 7, leaving Missouri and northwest Arkansas in Federal hands. The battle was actually named after the …

Queen Wilhelmina State Park

Queen Wilhelmina State Park renewed and continues a tradition that began near the end of the nineteenth century by providing mountaintop lodging and recreation on Rich Mountain, Arkansas’s second highest peak at 2,681 feet above sea level. With the construction of the Kansas City, Pittsburg and Gulf Railroad (now the Kansas City Southern) through the Ouachita Mountains of west-central Arkansas, railroad officials sought to increase passenger traffic by opening, on June 22, 1898, a thirty-five-room hostelry on Rich Mountain. Its 300-seat dining room was sometimes used as a ballroom where an orchestra entertained guests. Because Dutch investors had provided financing for the railroad, the lodge was named Wilhelmina Inn after Holland’s Queen Wilhelmina. The venture proved unsuccessful, and after 1900, …

South Arkansas Arboretum State Park

South Arkansas Arboretum State Park preserves native flora and fauna of the West Gulf Coastal Plain while offering educational and recreational activities for visitors. Located in El Dorado (Union County), it is Arkansas’s only natural state park located within a city. Added to the state park system in the 1990s, it is Arkansas’s fiftieth state park. The late James Riley, a biology teacher at the adjacent El Dorado High School, is credited as the driving force behind the arboretum’s creation, including securing federal education grants for land acquisition and early development. Using an office in the high school, Riley devised a plan to use land belonging to the school system for educational displays, scientific studies, and a park-like setting for …

Village Creek State Park

Village Creek State Park in northeast Arkansas, located six miles south of Wynne (Cross County), encompasses almost 7,000 acres along Crowley’s Ridge, preserving the ridge’s unique natural features. Park facilities occupy only a fraction of the total acreage, while the rest of the land remains in its natural state. While Village Creek Park, named for a stream that flows through the area, is classified as a “natural” state park, it also preserves part of the rich history of the region. Early settlers named the area Old Cherokee Village, though there is little evidence of Cherokee occupation outside scattered camp remnants. A section of the 1820s Military Road that once linked Memphis, Tennessee, to Little Rock (Pulaski County) is still visible …

Watson State Park

In 1937, Dr. John Brown Watson, the first president of Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff), donated 100 acres of land southwest of Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) for a state park. This would be one of the first public parks for African Americans in the South, where schools, recreational facilities, and other institutions were off limits to them throughout the century-long Jim Crow era of segregation. The park was named for the benefactor, Watson, a Black academic who was born in Texas but educated at the elite Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and Morehouse College in Atlanta. Arkansas’s honor in being early to create a park for African Americans was short-lived, …

White Oak Lake State Park

White Oak Lake State Park in Ouachita and Nevada counties in southwest Arkansas provides access to fishing on White Oak Lake and other recreational opportunities, including camping, picnicking, hiking, and interpretive programs. The lake contains bass, crappie, catfish, and bream, and the park is also rich in wildlife, including great blue herons, egrets, ospreys, green herons, and bald eagles. The land that is now White Oak Lake and White Oak Lake State Park was acquired by the federal government in the 1930s through the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of 1937. This act was intended to assist farmers during the Depression by making it possible for them to own land rather than continuing in tenant arrangements. In 1957, the State of …

Withrow Springs State Park

Withrow Springs State Park is located approximately five miles north of Huntsville (Madison County) in the Ozark Mountains of northwest Arkansas. The park was created among scenic mountains and valleys in a wilderness that surrounds the site’s key feature, Withrow Spring. At first, the park was also called Withrow Spring State Park—that name appears in literature from the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism as late as the mid-1970s—but common usage has made the name Withrow Springs State Park. The spring, which has a constant temperature of fifty-four degrees, served as a common watering place for area settlers and travelers in the 1800s. No archaeological information reveals whether the spring was used prior to this time. It is named for …

Woolly Hollow State Park

Woolly Hollow State Park, located near Greenbrier (Faulkner County), is unique among Arkansas’s fifty-two state parks because it began as the first scientific study in North America of soil and silt erosion with a specific watershed. Originally built in 1935, the lake and the surrounding area opened as a state park on November 2, 1973. The refurbished Woolly Cabin, the homestead of the family after whom the park is named, still stands in the park about three-quarters of a mile from its original location. Woolly Hollow remains one of Arkansas’s most popular state parks and hosts a number of activities for children and adults each year. In 1851, William Riley Woolly and his family left Waynesboro, Tennessee, to homestead in …