Arkansas and the Louisiana Purchase
In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson signed the papers to purchase the vast territory of Louisiana from Napoleon's France, doubling the size of the United States. In 1815, President James Madison ordered an official survey of the area to establish a system for distributing to veterans of the War of 1812 land they had been promised.
On October 27, 1815, a survey party led by Prospect K. Robbins headed north from the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers to establish a north-south line to be known as the Fifth Principal Meridian. The same day, a party led by Joseph C. Brown departed westward from the junction of the St. Francis River and the Mississippi to establish an east-west line, known as a baseline.
Photo Facts
Louisiana Purchase State Park near Brinkley
The crossing of the two lines would be the initial point from which future surveys would originate. Robbins' party had traveled north almost 56 miles when they crossed the baseline surveyed by Brown's party. Two gum trees about 18 inches in diameter were marked as witness trees to delineate the initial point, some 26 miles west of the Mississippi.
Both the meridian and the baseline would later be extended, and land surveys for all or parts of the Louisiana Purchase states west of the Mississippi would subsequently be measured from this point in an eastern Arkansas headwater swamp.
The site went unheralded for more than a century. In 1921, two surveyors discovered the witness trees, and the L'Anguille Chapter of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution in nearby Marianna placed a monument there in 1926.
Two hundred years after the purchase, the Louisiana Purchase Historic State Park near Brinkley preserves this site.
Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993, visitors can walk an elevated, barrier-free boardwalk through the swamp and to the monument, experiencing the sights and sounds
of the wilderness much as the original surveyors did.
Ties to the Louisiana Purchase are not, though, limited to this state park. As part of the commemoration, 13 museums and sites across Arkansas featured exhibits and programs during 2003 that focused on the different aspects of Arkansas's role in the Louisiana Purchase. Included in many of these programs were exhibits that interpreted Native American tribes and life before the Purchase and the ways in which their lives changed after settlers arrived.
For more information on Arkansas and the Louisiana Purchase visit www.lapurchase.org.