The past environment of the Arkansas Delta was created and controlled by the Mississippi River as it flowed through America’s vast heartland.
In the lower portion of its journey from Minnesota pass Memphis, Nachez, and New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico, the river has meandered ceaselessly across a broad valley, leaving behind an intricate pattern of its former channels and courses.
The flow of the Mississippi River is often quite deceptive. In a manner of only a few hours it can go from a wide, placid, almost lazy stream as illustrated by early drawings to the most frightening torrent imaginable.
This often turbulent passage transports sediment all along its route, carving large chunks of earth, along with large trees and structures, from the outer edges of its sinuous flow to deposit tons upon tons of gravel, sand, silt, clay downstream in newly formed point bars and islands. In fact, the Lakeport Plantation itself is situated on the point bar deposits created by the meandering Mississippi some several hundred years ago.
For some considerable length of its course the Mississippi River flows east or west creating wide, looping bends. Four of the most famous of these features, called collectively the Greenville Bends, were located just north of the Lakeport Plantation. Filled with snags and sawyers, the passage of these bends were long, tedious, and often dangerous.
Often, in periods of high current, the river cuts across the narrow necks of the oxbows it has created, to cut-off whole areas from the main channel and create the ox-bow lakes like Lake Chicot near Lake Village and Lake Lee in Mississippi.
A river-boat pilot who was to become one of America’s most famous authors, experienced the awesome power of the river during the dark of night not far from the Lakeport Plantation when the American Cut-Off was created..
This dynamic action of the river creates and reworks an environment composed of sandy natural levees, point bars with their ridge and swale topography, as well as clay-filled back swamps with distributary channels; each with its own characteristic soils, flora and fauna.
As a result of its constant motion, swinging back and forth across its valley, the Mississippi has been constantly adopting new channels and courses as it moves toward the Gulf; channels and courses which have been intensely mapped over the past two hundred years.
European and American explorers and travelers from the middle of the 16th Century onward have reported on the incredible richness of the valley’s flora and fauna. Flocks of birds including immense numbers of migratory fowl nested on the islands and the sheltered sloughs. Fish by the hundred-weight swam in the rivers and back away from the active channels the region teamed with deer, while herds of buffalo inhabited the scattered prairies.
But most of all the region has been made famous by its great and long lasting floods; the greatest of which occurred in the spring of 1927.
Since that time many billions of dollars have been spent in additional attempts to regulate the flow of the Mississippi to meet the needs of the region’s commerce and to provide ever increasing large methods of water-borne commerce
Humans first entered the Arkansas Delta more than 9,000 years ago. Initially, the impacts these first inhabitants made on the valley’s landscape was limited to the manufacture of stone artifacts and the hunting and gathering of the abundant wildlife and plants. As the population increased over time, these alterations came to include the construction of more elaborate dwellings as well as earthen mounds used for ceremonial and religious activities, and other population centers.
With the arrival of Europeans and Americans the human impact on the landscape intensified greatly. At first this took the form of the establishment of trading and governmental centers such as Arkansas Post and the creation of small, individual farmsteads.
Descriptions of the early French inhabitants of the region are generally unflattering; painting these hunters, trappers, and traders as lawless and dangerous. The depiction of the early American residents continued this theme.
The greatest impact these new residents had upon the landscape was the introduction of the idea of land ownership. The initial explorers were acting on behalf of established European governments to claim ownership of this vast region along with the exclusive rights to control the lucrative fur trading system. French ownership patterns tended to allot private lands in blocks which extended back from river banks. The Spanish granted much more extensive parcels of land and many of the current property titles can be traced back to these early grants. The Villemont family, direct descendants from Don Carols de Villemont, commandant of Arkansas Post in 1790 unsuccessfully defended a claim for a prime area around Point Chicot in Chicot County as being originally part of a Spanish Land Grant.
After the acquisition of the vast Louisiana Purchase by the United States government in 1803, a new system of land ownership was imposed on the region. This was the public land survey system developed by Thomas Jefferson whereby parcels of land could be designated by a system of Sections, Townships, and Ranges whose locations were permanently established through surveys.
This is the system which was in place when Joel Johnson first came to the Arkansas Delta in 1831 and much of the land he acquired, he purchased directly from the United States Government and these purchases were recorded in the General Land Office records.
With this system in place an increasing number of farms and settlements began to appear along the river.
This increased settlement was matched by the development of a much more sophisticated political system. Initially, what was to become the State of Arkansas was contained entirely within the political unit called the Louisiana Territory. When Louisiana became a State, this area was incorporated for a time into the Missouri Territory with this portion of the delta being made a part of what was called Arkansas County. In 1819, the United States Government created the Arkansas Territory, with its associated governmental institutions, and in 1836, Arkansas was granted statehood
For the next several decades the area grew and the impacts on the landscape became more extensive. In the delta, land ownership and agricultural development was controlled by a relatively few individuals and families; many of whom set out to create plantations modeled on those elsewhere in the southeastern United States. Large tracts of land were cleared and put into agricultural production by the use of slave labor. The immense stands of vegetation including huge cypress trees and vast stands of cane were cleared and burned. Forest trails were widened to accommodate oxen and horse-drawn vehicles and, more importantly, steamboat landings suitable for the transfer of goods and travelers were established up and down the river.
As the available "high ground" was taken for agricultural development by individual farms, larger scale developments designed to minimize the river’s impact on the landscape were undertaken. The most monumental of these efforts was the creation of man-made levees designed to restrict the river’s often devastating floods. Levee districts were formed and public monies, in the form of taxes, were collected to build and maintain these elements of the infra-structure.
In addition to the extensive networks of levees, drainage networks were constructed so that the effects of run-offs and overflows could be minimized.
Joel Johnson arrived in Chicot County in the heart of the Arkansas Delta in 1831 at the mature age of 41. Joel was one of the youngest children of a very prominent Kentucky family which included Richard M. Johnson, Vice President of the United States under Martin Van Buren, and Benjamin Johnson, one of the first federally appointed judges for the Territory of Arkansas and later a federal district judge for Eastern Arkansas. Through Richard, Joel became a member of the political and familial group led by the Conways and Seviers known as The Family which came to dominate Arkansas political and economic affairs for many decades.
Using cash and a variety of credit instruments, Joel set about acquiring land from both public and private sources, including land purchased from the Bowie brothers who were prominent land speculators.
During the 1830s Joel was successful in acquiring significant amounts of land; and, equally important, purchasing a large number of slaves who would provide the labor to clear the fields and manage the crops. It appears that Joel was present on these properties only a portion of the year; spending a good portion of the year back in Kentucky.
Although his holdings in land and in slaves was one of the largest in Chicot County, the Johnson home seems to have been fairly modest as his home and other buildings were assessed at a value of only $200. Other plantations of this time as captured visually by artists from steamboats also seemed rather unimposing.
Elsewhere in the county other aspiring planters were busy developing their own holdings to create a landscape which was rapidly being transformed from wilderness to agriculture for which cotton was the all important cash crop. Prominent among the neighboring plantations were farms owned by Silas Craig who had surveyed a good portion of the area, Joel’s brother Richard and his famous in-law, Ambrose Sevier, and S. C. Faulkner, who became known as the Arkansas Traveler.
Joel died an extremely wealthy man in 1846. Although he had prepared a will, some of its provisions were contested. During this time, his son, Lycurgus Leonides, acted as administrator for the estate and it was more than 10 years before Joel’s wife and children came completely into their inheritance.
Lycurgus, who had been born in Scott County, Kentucky in had come to join his father in Chicot County several years earlier and had established a plantation of his own down-river from Lakeport adjacent to Kentucky Bend. He had married Lydia Taylor in 1842.
Joel’s estate was final settled in 1858. In this settlement, now entirely between Joel’s wife and children, Verlinda, Julia, and Lycurgus Johnson acquired the Lakeport Plantation (valued at $153,000); Cyrus R. and Victor M. acquired the place where Lycurgus was living on Kentucky Bend (valued at $90,000. John T. Johnson took the property called Black Water (valued at $33,000). The family then divided all the slaves and personal property in what they declared was "a fair and just and equal manner" among the six owners.
This settlement established the Lakeport Plantation as the home and property of Lycurgus and Lydia and it is highly likely that construction for the Lakeport Plantation House was begun very soon after the settlement was finalized
So, by 1860, Lycurgus and Lydia were master and mistress of a major southern plantation composed of thousands of acres of prime agricultural land and well over 100 slaves.
All of this was to change dramatically as the storm clouds of hostility which had been gathering strength broke open and involved all American in its great Civil War.
Although after the fighting had ceased Lycurgus was to file an unsuccessful claim for confiscated livestock and other property with the Southern War Claims Lakeport seemed to have gone through this ordeal of fire structurally intact.
One group of artifacts, a silver pitcher and cups, are known to have survived in the family’s possession from the Civil War era; buried on the plantation for safe keeping until after the "unpleasantness" had subsided.
While many, if not most, of his friends and neighbors were forced into bankruptcy, Lycurgus was able to weather this storm and adjust to the new political, social, and economic realities. Thus, in 1870, Lycurgus is still the head of a major agricultural enterprise whose total worth and cotton production were the highest in the county. Further, his daughter Mary married a young man named Isaac Worthington, the heir to the neighboring Red Leaf plantation.
Lycurgus died in 1876 and ownership of the Lakeport Plantation passes to Lydia, who, for a time, returned to Kentucky, leaving Lakeport under the supervision of her son Theodore Johnson and son-in-law Isaac Worthington.
It is, however, her youngest surviving son, Victor M. Johnson, who comes into legal possession of Lakeport shortly before 1900.
As a young man, Victor was educated at St. Louis University. Subsequently, he became interested in the cultivation of honey and constructed an apiary at Lakeport and stories have it, invented the first "Bee Vail" now commonly used in the industry.
In 1885 Victor enrolled in the Arkansas Industrial University Medical School in Little Rock and subsequently continued his medical studies at Bellevue Hospital Medical in new York City
Returning to Lakeport, Victor continued his medical practice serving as a traveling physician to the workers of the Sunnyside Plantation, many of which were first generation Italian immigrants.
Much of the day to day activities associated with Dr. Johnson’s management of Lakeport can be found recorded in the account books he kept from the late 1800's well into the third decade of the 20th Century.
The account books show the continued importance of cotton as a cash crop as well as the importance of the growing and harvesting hay. They contain accounts kept for his medical practice, as well as the production and shipping of honey and the sale of small commodities and farm items to others. There are also numerous entries related to the purchase and repair of various items of farm equipment.
Heirloom dishes and silverware, the dining room table, and a desk used to keep his medical and other records date at least to this period of Lakeport’s history.
In about 1917 Dr. Johnson moved the family from Lakeport to Greenville, Mississippi, and shortly thereafter sold the plantation with its fields and houses. These passed into the ownership of the Epstein family who have continued the careful stewardship of this unique reminder of the delta’s past.
Like all other Delta plantations, Lakeport was physically created through the labor of slaves brought into Arkansas specifically for this purpose.
Tax records indicate that when Joel Johnson first began to acquire the lands in Chicot County that were to form the basis of his agricultural fortune, he was already the owner of at least 23 slaves which made him the largest single slave-holder in the county. Likewise his brother Benjamin, then residing in Pulaski County, owned 21 slaves, making him the second largest single slave owner in that county. By 1833, tax records indicate that Joel’s slaveholdings had increased significantly to 50.
Unlike the owners of Lakeport and their landed neighbors, we know very little about the lives of the individuals who made up the vast slave workforce. Occasionally, however, past records and documents give us tantalizingly brief glimpses. Often such opportunities occur at the time in which slaves were bought and sold. Such is the case of a complicated bill of sale recorded in Chicot County in 1832 which, in addition to describing land purchased by Joel Johnson from Fielder Offutt, gives the names of some 24 slaves purchased by Joel Johnson in the same transaction.
These individuals are "Jacob, Sarah, Holman, Mayete, Yellow George, Bill a brick mason, Thomas a Carpenter, Louis a Blacksmith, Stephen, Charlotte, Mark, Mary, Louisa, Hiram, Patrick, Mary Green, and Bob."
It is far more usual for information about a plantation’s slave population to be discovered in a generalized way among various tax and census records such as the Federal Slave Schedules for 1850 which lists the slaves belonging to the heirs of Joel Johnson and those of 1860 which list the slaveholdings of Lycurgus Johnson.
Slave duties were many and varied; most of the time supervised by an overseer. Many spent their lives devoted to difficult manual labor associated with the various demands of the agricultural cycle. Others, like those mentioned above, were skilled craftspersons. who were often hired out to others because of their specialized abilities.
Still others performed household duties. Nancy Sherrard of Steubenville Ohio who had been hired by Lycurgus as a tutor for his children, wrote in a letter in 1860 that,
"In the family of Mr. Johnson there were seven or eight house servants. He had a well-trained dining room servant, whom he had bought a year before, who was valued at $1,700. Mr. Johnson had bought him, his wife, and a child three years old, for the sum of $3,000"
The living accommodations for plantation slaves seemed generally to have varied from terrible to very poor. Doubtless there were many "quarters" present on the Lakeport Plantation but we have no direct information about their quality, number or locations. However, as late as the mid-20th Century some such structures were still standing as part of the region’s built environment, like those located near Yellow Bayou in Chicot County.
Not all slaves were content to live out their lives in servitude. By the late 1850s newspapers had become filled with advertisements offering rewards for runaway slaves as well as notices of captured slaves.
The institution of slavery was ended by the Civil War and it took several decades for the Plantation South to develop alternative labor arrangements to replace it. Sharecropping and employment for wages were early experiments, supported and, to some extent, managed by the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly called the Freedmen’s Bureau.
Because of the difficulties of adjusting to a new system of labor (which also required a restructuring of social and other economic relationships), many of the region’s large landowners turned to immigration. Many of the families who later settled in Tonitown first came to Arkansas through the plantations of Chicot County.
For a large portion of his professional life, Dr. Victor Johnson served as a traveling physician to the newcomers laboring on the nearby Sunnyside Plantation
Now, at the beginning of the 21th century, much of the energy needed to carry out the agricultural practices is supplied by machinery.