Lakeport Plantation

About this property

Lakeport Plantation is a historic antebellum plantation house located near Lake Village, Arkansas. It was built around 1859 by Lycurgus Johnson with the profits of slave labor. The house was restored between 2003 and 2008 and is now a part of Arkansas State University as a Heritage site museum. The plantation was established in 1831 by Joel Johnson, from a prominent planter family in Scott County, Kentucky. He arrived with 23 enslaved people and set up a slave labor camp to produce cotton, an endeavor that made him one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the state. Joel Johnson died in 1846, leaving the plantation's ownership in legal dispute. In 1857, his son Lycurgus Johnson, a successful operator of his own slave labor camp, acquired the title to Lakeport. He also took over the enslavement of 88 people. By 1850, he had 2,850 acres of land and 95 slaves. The plantation's mansion was built around 1859 in the Greek Revival architectural style. By 1860, owned more than 155 slaves, and forced them to work some 4,000 acres of land at Lakeport and his other Arkansas properties. Records show that most of the enslaved people were field hands, but some were masons, house-hold servants, and carpenters. Plantation life was exhausting for those forced to work it; many worked six days a week with only one day off, typically Sunday. The plantation was highly profitable as cotton prices increased with European demand, though the Civil War took a toll on Johnson's fortunes. Confederate forces burned 158 bales of the plantation's cotton in 1862 to prevent its capture by Union forces. Tax records show that by 1864 the number of people enslaved at Lakeport had declined to 24, as many former slaves fled after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The end of the Civil War resulted in the emancipation of the remaining enslaved people. While they obtained their freedom, they still held limited rights and faced continued discrimination and oppression in Arkansas. The Freedmen's Bureau was created to help freedmen, transitioning many into sharecropping and tenant farming. Lycurgus worked closely with the Bureau and negotiated wages for the no-longer-enslaved people to labor on his plantation and continue to grow cotton. Within a few years, many of the freedmen worked for Johnson either as paid laborers or as sharecroppers, as other jobs were few in the agricultural delta. He became well known in the county because he managed to continue to profit despite the war and subsequent flooding and economic depression. Lakeport was among the leading cotton producers in Chicot County in 1870.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

More in Chicot County

Historic places, battles, and census history across Chicot County.

More historic places in Arkansas

Browse all historic places in Arkansas.

Conflict records

Explore 19,000+ military engagements across American history.

Arkansas history

Colonial settlement, territorial period, and statehood narrative.