We’re very glad you stopped by.

We’ve got lots of things to show you.

You see, over the years, the name Lakeport has been applied to a number of things here in the Arkansas Delta.

If you look on a contemporary Arkansas Highway map you’ll see the name Lakeport beside a dot down by the Mississippi River just a bit south of US Highway 82. This marks the spot of a steamboat landing from which hundreds of thousands of bales of cotton were shipped down river to New Orleans.

If you look at a slightly older map you will also see the name Lakeport applied to a large plantation established before the Civil War by a man named Joel Johnson from Kentucky. As you’ll see the plantation’s size and shape has changed considerably since then.

More recently the name Lakeport has been given to a very large house built on the plantation about 1860. Now nearly 140 years old it is the last antebellum plantation house still standing in the Arkansas Delta.

And now we are giving the name Lakeport to this Digital Location which is sponsored by the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program and developed by Archeological Assessments, Inc.

Over the next year or so, we’re going to build this Lakeport into something that we all can use to enjoy and to learn some things we didn’t know about this part of Arkansas. We’re going to do this by telling a few stories, sharing some photographs and drawings, introducing you to some maps and statistics. We also intend to ask you some questions. In the beginning the stories, photographs, drawings, maps, statistics, and questions are things that we will be putting up. We’ll have places you can go to meet the different people who have lived, worked, and visited Lakeport and learn about the different things they did to make Lakeport what once was and what it is now . You will even have an opportunity to take a 3-D digital tour of the house .  We’ll have a place you can go to learn about the landscape within which Lakeport is situated and how it has been altered by the many generations of humans who have lived here.

But, and this is very important to us, we don’t want Lakeport to be defined only by the stories we tell. So the places we are creating here will have all sorts of "building blocks" we can use to tell lots of different stories and to answer the different kinds of questions that will come up as we visit here and think about what we’ve encountered.

Let us know what you think about Lakeport. Send us questions, ideas, information about resources you know about or would like to see. Just as Lakeport wouldn’t be the place it came to be without the contributions from all who were there, this site won’t be the kind of place it can be, unless those who come here also make a contribution to its creation.