January 2, 2002

The old Lake Fort Smith State Park was closed. It first became a state park in 1967, making it Arkansas’s twenty-third state park. The opening of the new Lake Fort Smith State Park in the spring of 2008 in a new location with entirely new facilities made it the newest of Arkansas’s state parks. At the park’s official dedication in 2008, 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. Plans for the future include linking Lake Fort Smith State Park to the Ozark Highlands Trail, since the old state park was the western terminus for this trail.