Listing Through Life

This museum is about four miles up the road from Plum Bayou. It’s a collection of buildings that were connected to local cotton farming. Displays and equipment explain the process of producing cotton, from planting the seeds to the finished product.

The visitor center and museum is in an old brick store built in 1912. Another section was added in 1929 as the Scott post office. It now houses special exhibits (currently one on Chinese immigrants in Arkansas).

The museum does a good job of explaining the process of farming cotton and makes it interesting.

Some random displays from the musuem:

The spread of the boll weevil.

Another building, a reconstruction, houses an original, fully restored cotton gin, where seed was separated from the cotton, and the cotton was baled.

Seed Warehouse No. 5 explains the process of storing, drying, and bagging cotton seeds. The doors to the building are through two Cotton Belt railroad cars.

An aerial view from … ? The store (visitor center) is on the right. Several of the buildings on the left are still there, but not part of the park.

We were hungry, so we walked through some of the buildings quickly and skipped the old tractor collection entirely. But it’s worth the time to visit — certainly a far cry better than the Lower White River Museum.

On a lazy Saturday morning, my wife and I drove to the two state parks near Scott so I could get my passport stamped. (I’ve been to both parks before, but my wife hadn’t.)

On entering the Plum Bayou visitor center, we were greeted by a ranger who escorted us into the theater and then spent the next 20 minutes or so telling us everything he knew about Mound Builder Indians and the park. He was a nice guy, and I appreciated his enthusiasm, but you wouldn’t want to talk to him if you were in a hurry. He’s the kind of guy who, if you asked him what time it was, would tell you how to build a watch.

On our drive in, we noticed that the sign was missing. My wife asked the ranger about it, and 10 minutes later, we had our answer. The park used to be called Totlec Mounds, named for the Toltec Indians in Mexico who also built mounds. But historians don’t think the Toltecs got anywhere near Arkansas, so the site has been renamed for a local stream. It took the state a couple years to provide a sign with the new name, and just a few months later, a local lad, probably high on some substance, lost control of his car and destroyed it. They’re still waiting for another sign. I had to take my picture with a banner over the front desk.

The park preserves the location of a group of 18 mounds constructed, supposedly, between the 7th and 11th centuries. It’s thought that the area was used for ceremonial and burial purposes and that very few people actually lived here. Many of the mounds have been leveled by farming, but there are still two large ones that probably had temples or such on the top and a smaller conical mound used as a burial site. There was once an embankment and moat surrounding the site on three side, while an ox-bow lake did, and still does, border the other side. It is believed the builders arranged the mounds to be used as a solar calendar.

We walked outside so my wife could see the mounds, but it was too warm for a mile-long hike, and mounds of dirt don’t look any different up close. Also, I’d been there before and knew there wasn’t anything fascinating that couldn’t be seen at a distance.

Here’s a photo I took in January, 2023 that shows the proximity of the larger mound to the ox-bow lake.

We were the only visitors for the entire time we were there, which surprised us on a Saturday morning.

Another twenty-minute drive from the Delta Heritage Trail brought me to this park.

The road in to the park dead-ends at a five-car parking lot. The park is unmanned, so I had to do my first emblem-rubbing to get my stamp. I did a practice rub, using the colored pencil I placed in my car for just this purpose, to make sure I wouldn’t mess up another passport. You can see the medallion embedded in the sign below.

A boardwalk winds back into the swamp, with signs along the way giving the history of the spot.

And swamp it is. This has been a very dry spring, and I was surprised to see how much water remained. I wonder if the state deliberately floods it to keep it authentic. Here’s the monument.

It’s hard to read, even on the spot. It says:

“THIS STONE MARKS THE BASE ESTABLISHED NOV. 10, 1815 FROM WHICH THE LANDS OF THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE WERE SURVEYED BY UNITED STATES ENGINEERS. THE FIRST SURVY FROM THIS POINT WAS MADE TO SATISFY THE CLAIMS OF THE SOLDIERS OF THE WAR OF 1812 WITH LAND BOUNTIES. ERECTED BY THE DAUGHTERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. SPONSORED BY THE L’ANGUILLE CHAPTER.”

And that was it. I did see a Prothonotary Warbler and a Baltimore Oriole in the swamp. I walked back down the boardwalk and headed for home.

Track my progress here.

When it’s complete, the Delta Heritage Trail will extend 84 miles, from just west of Helena to Arkansas City. After leaving Mississippi River State Park, I drove 20 minutes to the headquarters for the trail, at the Barton Trailhead.

The visitor center is housed in an old cotton gin, which I thought was very cool, but there are no exhibits, just a lame gift shop.

I got my passport stamped, and I felt like I should do something to earn it, so I walked south along the trail for about half a mile, then turned around and walked back. The trail ran arrow-straight on an old railroad bed through woods with no points of interest except this bridge.

One guy passed me on a bike, but otherwise I was alone for as far as I could see, except for this big bug.

Late last summer, I went birding in southeastern Arkansas with some friends. We stopped at the Arkansas City trailhead, the southern terminus of the trail and ate our lunches in the pavilion.

I went back last month, on the day I visited Lake Chicot State Park. Arkansas City is an unmanned trailhead, so I made my first attempt at doing a rub on the sign to get my stamp. I didn’t have a crayon or pencil, so I attempted to use a pen. It was such a major failure that I tossed that passport and began again with a new one. Anyway, when I was in Arkansas City, I took some photos of the interpretive signs that give a history of Arkansas City.

Track my progress here.

One of my birding goals, still unrealized, is to see a Swainson’s Warbler in Arkansas. A couple had been reported recently from this park in near Helena, and I drove down early on Thursday to see them. The birds were my priority, so I drove past the visitor center to the spot where they were reported and spent about an hour there and at various other spots along the road looking for them without luck. The road was a narrow blacktop through deep and tall woods. It was a cool morning, and the scenery was beautiful albeit Swainson-free.

The park is within the St. Francis National Forest and shares a visitor center with it. I had to backtrack about six miles to get there.

The enthusiastic woman behind the counter who stamped my passport attempted to get me involved in a second state park program, this one for kids, which involved interviewing a park ranger, writing down safety guidelines, pledging not to litter, etc. I declined. But I did get my fifth passport stamp and earned a Club 52 sticker.

I walked a short trail by the visitor center, then drove south through the park. I had the choice of two roads. I stuck to the paved one that I’d been on earlier, hoping still to hear a Swainson’s. I passed the two man-made lakes in the park — This is Bear Creek Lake.

I think a bit of the park borders the Mississippi River, but I never saw it. I pulled over at an overlook, thinking I could glimpse the water from there, but it was just “the view from Crowley’s Ridge,” and not much of a view at that.

There were a few other short trails I could have taken, and the second, dirt road that runs parallel to the one I took but down in the valley, but that wasn’t the day’s objective.

Track my progress here.