June 19, 2008

Lake Fort Smith State Park was officially dedicated. At the dedication, park officials and local leaders celebrated the site that overlooks Lake Fort Smith and that in many ways reproduces the environment of the earlier park. Although it first became a state park in 1967, which made it Arkansas’s twenty-third state park, Lake Fort Smith State Park opened in the spring of 2008 in a new location with entirely new facilities, which made it the newest of Arkansas’s state parks. The City of Fort Smith paid $12 million to replace the state park’s amenities at the new location, and the Arkansas State Parks system added $10 million for additional features.