Louisiana Purchase Historic State Park

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 transferred an immense territory from France to the United States, stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and roughly doubling the size of the young country. But the land was almost entirely unmapped, and before it could be sold to settlers or organized into states, it had to be surveyed into an orderly grid.

In 1815, two survey parties set out to establish the starting point for that grid in the newly acquired land. One party ran a line west from the Mississippi River, the other north from the mouth of the Arkansas River, and where the two lines crossed, in the middle of a swamp, they marked the initial point. From this spot in eastern Arkansas, surveyors laid out the township and section grid that shaped how land across the Louisiana Purchase would be measured, sold, and settled.

Because there were no landmarks in the trackless swamp, the surveyors did what surveyors of the era did: they blazed nearby trees to mark and witness the point. According to the record, they cut marks into two gum trees to record the location, creating a reference that could be found again in the featureless wetland.

For over a century the exact spot was little noted, until in the 1920s a survey crew rediscovered the historic witness trees and confirmed the initial point. A granite monument was later placed to mark it, and in time the state established the park to protect both the historic point and the swamp around it. The marker at the end of the boardwalk stands at the very place where the mapping of the West began.

The swamp itself may be the park's greatest surprise. Much of the eastern Arkansas Delta was once covered in dense bottomland hardwood and cypress-tupelo swamp, but the vast majority was cleared and drained over the last century for cotton, rice, and soybean fields. This park preserves a rare surviving fragment of that lost forest, a headwater swamp fed by rain and seepage rather than a river.

The elevated boardwalk lets visitors walk out over the standing water without disturbing it, passing among water tupelo, bald cypress, and other trees adapted to life with their roots submerged. It is a hushed, green, mirror-still world, and it gives a vivid sense of what much of the Delta looked like before the plow, all reached on an easy, accessible walk.

The swamp teems with life. Wading birds, woodpeckers, and songbirds move through the trees, turtles bask on logs, and frogs and insects fill the air with sound in the warmer months. The dark water and dense canopy create an atmosphere quite unlike the open farm country all around, a pocket of wilderness in a landscape long since tamed.

The park is remote and unstaffed, centered entirely on the boardwalk and its marker, so visitors should come prepared with water and insect protection and should plan the drive in advance. It makes a rewarding, offbeat stop for anyone crossing the Delta, joining a pivotal moment in the nation's history to a beautiful surviving scrap of its original landscape.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.