The Plantation

When Joel Johnson arrived in Chicot County in 1831 it was not his intent to establish a small, self-sufficient family farm. Rather it was his plan to develop out of the Arkansas wilderness a vast, wealthy agricultural complex modeled on the established plantations which had been flourishing for several decades in the settled lands east of the Mississippi River. He already had one of the essential assets for making this plan come true; a large contingent of slaves. In 1830 Chicot County's population stood at only 1,165. Of that number, 888 (76.2%) were free whites, 270 (23.2%) were black slaves, and 7 (.6%) were free persons of color. The percentage of slaves was considerably higher than it was in the state as a whole, but significantly lower than in the nearby slave states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Slaveowners were only a small minority of the county's population, and those who did own slaves owned only a few. Census records indicate that only two men in the county owned twenty slaves, the generally accepted minimum number to be considered a "planter." Thus, when Joel Johnson arrived in the county in 1831, his twenty-three slaves made him the largest slaveowner in the county.

It also seems that he had access to another essential element in making his plan come true; access to capital. A large amount of capital had already been expended in the ownership of slaves but more was needed to buy the large tracts of land that would be needed for his purposes. Land records show that he was able to purchase extensive lands from both public and private sources by paying cash or arranging credit. One such tract of land was southeast of Old River Lake (present-day Lake Chicot) just above a large oxbow curve in the river called American Bend. This is the property that came to be called Lakeport after a nearby steamboat landing.

The purchase of large amounts of suitable farm land and the ownership of large numbers of slaves, however, were only the beginning. Before the fertile land could produce a crop, it had to be "cleared" of trees and underbrush. Even after the clearing was accomplished, it took years of additional "grubbing" away bushes, clearing stumps, and leveling to make a field smooth. Then there was the never ending battle with the river and its floods.

The first generation of planters who came to the Arkansas Delta was often able to clear only enough land to raise a small crop. The more land that could be cleared, the larger the crop that could be planted, and the greater the potential profits to be made. In the years to come, those profits, and the power and prestige that accompanied them, would be derived from three major sources--ownership of large tracts of rich river land, ownership of black slaves to provide a reliable source of cheap labor, and the production of a cash crop. In this part of the delta, that crop was cotton.

For the next fifteen years Johnson expanded his holdings in land and slaves and brought more land under cultivation. The soil produced abundantly, and slave-based plantation agriculture became firmly entrenched in Chicot County. An 1839 map of the region showed approximately fifty plantations along the river and the area around Old River Lake. The census figures for 1840 revealed that the county's population had risen to 3,806, but whites, who had comprised 76.2% of the population in 1830, now accounted for only 29% (1,105), while black slaves, who made up only 23.2% of the county's population in 1830, now accounted for 70.9% (2,698) of the total.

So it was that both the nature and function of Lakeport changed, and changed dramatically, over the course of the first several decades of its existence. There are no photographs to show us how it might have looked during its early days but we are fortunately enough to have a few graphic depictions of plantations in this portion of the Arkansas Delta which were made by artists who captured their impressions as their steamboats took them up and down the Mississippi River.