Cadron Settlement Park
Years ago, when I attended college in Conway, I often visited Toad Suck Park at the lock and dam on the Arkansas River that shares its unusual name.
The view of the river was beautiful, and the park was a peaceful place to study or take a break from the rigors of academia. It was thanks to a brochure I picked up at Toad Suck Park that I learned about another nearby park, Cadron Settlement Park.
The brochure made it clear that the park was historically significant, so being a lover of Arkansas history, I knew I had to pay a visit. Cadron Settlement Park is indeed a beautiful and historic site, and I’ve visited it several times throughout the years.
Cadron Settlement Park is located where Cadron Creek meets the Arkansas River a couple of miles north of Conway. According to several early Arkansas historians, the site was the location of a native American village before 1541 and was visited by the legendary Spanish explorer Hernando Desoto.
When the French took over the area in the early 1800s, the settlers established a fort, which they referred to as Quadron. The name eventually became anglicized to Cadron. A settlement and trading post formed around the fort. The trading post was quite prosperous and, according to a letter written by a fur trader named William Frazier to a friend in 1810, the site was home to about 100 men and women, both “whites and Indians.”
Noted botanist Thomas Nuttall, who traveled Arkansas in the early 1800s, visited Cadron in 1818 and made note of a trading post and a mercantile store in operation. Nuttall didn’t stay long, but he did return in December 1819 and remained until January of the following year. In his journal, Nuttall wrote that excessive drinking, jockeying, fighting and gambling were popular pastimes at Cadron.
In 1820, a post office was established at Cadron and a wagon road to the capital of the Arkansas Territory, Arkansas Post, was built. Mail arrived at Arkansas Post every other week.
Another road was built from Cadron to southern Arkansas, which allowed mail to be transported as far as New Orleans. Cadron would eventually become part of the historic Butterfield Mail Route, which connected Memphis to San Francisco.
By 1820, Cadron was home to around 720 people and the Arkansas Territorial Legislature voted to move the territory’s government to the town in June. Unfortunately for Cadron residents, the acting territorial governor, Robert Crittenden, vetoed the decision and opted to move the capital to Little Rock just five months later.
Over 700 Cherokee Indians were forced to stay at the settlement during the Trail of Tears in April 1834, as low water levels on the Arkansas River stopped steamboats as a means of transport to reservations in what is now the state of Oklahoma.
While Cadron was a booming settlement during much of the early 1800s, it began to lose its prominence when the Little Rock & Fort Smith Railroad laid tracks 2 miles north in 1874 and people left Cadron to follow the railroad.
In 1976, the Faulkner County Historical Society, in conjunction with the Conway Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, created Cadron Settlement Park. Trails and a pavilion were constructed, as was a replica of the blockhouse written about by Thomas Nuttall in 1820. In 1991, vandals set fire to the structure, but a second one was built in 1998.
If you’re in the Conway area and looking for a place to get some peace and quiet off the beaten path or want to experience an important location in Arkansas history, take some time to visit Cadron Settlement Park. You won’t be disappointed.
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A sixth-generation Arkansan, Darrell Brown is a lover of all things Arkansas. He lives in Saline County with his wife, Amy, and their beloved Boston Terrier, Dixie. His previous columns can be found at Allaroundarkansas.blogspot.com.