Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Humble history
Fascinating past a compelling reason to visit state park
Louisiana Purchase State Park is one of the coolest places in Arkansas.
Hold on a second. We’re going to have to go at this a little differently from here onward because we are quickly learning that every state park is one of the coolest places in Arkansas.
So let’s do it this way. Louisiana Purchase State Park is this week’s coolest place in Arkansas.
I visited this extraordinary site Sunday with my adventuring partner as part of our quest to visit all 52 Arkansas state parks.
Tucked in a remote swamp between Brinkley and Holly Grove, Louisiana Purchase State Park is a lot different than most state parks. There is no visitor center. There are no interactive exhibits, and there are no friendly park rangers to give tips about interesting things to see or the best trails to walk. There is only one “trail,” an elevated boardwalk that leads into a swamp of immersed tupelo trees.
The first stop on the boardwalk is a station to document your visit in your Arkansas State Parks Passport. It is a booklet available at any state park visitor center. Each park has a special stamp. A friendly park employee will stamp your passport on request. Five stamps entitles you to an attractive sticker. If you get 25 stamps, you’ll get a deck of cards. If you get all 52 stamps, you get a T-shirt. My adventuring partner badly wants that T-shirt.
Again, there is no friendly park employee at the Louisiana Purchase Passport Station. There is a metal medallion embedded in wood. You have to emboss the stamp onto the page by rubbing it with a pencil. Since we didn’t have a pencil, we used a bar of soap. It worked sort of, but we fretted that it would not pass muster in an official audit. Heaven forbid such an oversight deprive my adventuring partner of her T-shirt.
There are, of course, metal signs that provide background about the site. We learned that it is a headwater swamp. It is different from a backwater swamp, which floods when nearby waterways swell and backflow into lowlands. Backwater swamps pulse, meaning they flood and drain. These cycles are a dominant influence on their ecology, on the ecology of neighboring ecosystems, and on the ecology of the region at large.
A headwater swamp essentially is a place where the water table is always at or very near ground level. The water is seldom deep, but it never completely drains or dries. Near constant inundation determines their ecology. Headwater swamps were once common in eastern Arkansas, but most have been drained to create farmland. Consequently, the headwater swamp is an endangered ecosystem.
You’ll learn that alligators have been documented in the swamp but that none has been seen in quite a long time. You’ll learn about the other fauna and flora that inhabits the swamp.
The payoff is at the end of the boardwalk. There you’ll find the reason why Louisiana Purchase State Park merits designation as a national historic landmark. In the water is a large engraved stone with a brass witness mark embedded in the base. Around the stone are bearing trees. This was the starting point for the original survey of the Louisiana Purchase, 828,000 square miles that the United States bought from France in 1803 for less than 3 cents per acre.
“Can you imagine us walking into some bank and asking them to finance a deal like that?” I asked. “We’ll need to see three months of pay stubs and an inventory of your monthly expenses. Your disposable income is what? And you want a $15 million loan for a bunch of unimproved property? Their shrieking laughter taunts us as we slink out the door in shame.”
It was sort of a reverse deal for Napoleon Bonaparte, the same Napoleon that lost almost his entire army retreating from Russia. The same Napoleon that won every battle except the last one. He needed quick cash to continue terrorizing Europe, so for about $15 million he sold all of the oil, all of the natural gas, all of the gold, all of the silver, all of the copper, all of the timber, all of the great ports on the Pacific Coast, all of the hydropower, all of the great inland and coastal fisheries, all of the wildlife. You kind of get the idea that the guy was a dumba…, you know, not real sharp.
Obviously, American leaders were more astute real estate speculators. The deal more than doubled the size of the United States. It ended Napoleon’s ambitions of making France a worldwide empire, and it was the beginning of the end of the Spanish Empire’s presence in America.
The survey that began where that rock stands is the basis of every real estate transaction that has occurred to date, and the basis of every real estate deed in the Louisiana Purchase area. Baseline Road in Little Rock is actually a baseline from the original survey.
The original surveyors did their work with compass, rod and chain. About two decades ago, modern surveyors using GPS and satellites tested the measurements of the original surveys. The original surveys were off by only 1 inch. A skeptic might suspect they said that so as not to throw more than 200 years of property records into chaos, but we’ll take their word for it.
To think all of that history, all of that wealth, all of the international reconfiguring that established the United States as a worldwide power, started right here in the middle of an East Arkansas wetland. That’s why this is such a cool place.
Right now is a great time to visit because there are no bugs. In the spring and summer, mosquitoes and buffalo gnats will challenge your enjoyment.
My friend and I obtained a pencil later in the day from a friendly employee at the Delta Heritage Trail State Park near Helena. More about that later. With our pencils, we made another stop at the Louisiana Purchase passport station on the return trip at night to record a more proper stamp. It was a minor inconvenience to ensure that we get our T-shirts.