Chicot County Courthouse

Chicot County has had several county seats, and the first, Villemont, was swallowed by the Mississippi River. Lake Village became the permanent seat in eighteen fifty-seven, and the courthouse that stands here today was built in nineteen fifty-six , late enough that Art Deco had fallen out of fashion nationally, but the architect Herbert Voelker used it anyway. The result is an orange-red brick structure with vertical concrete bands emphasizing the second and third floors, scroll relief above the entryways, and a fasces , the Roman symbol for authority , cast in concrete above the front door.

Voelker had designed eleven courthouses in Texas before this one; Chicot County was his only Arkansas commission. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand and six, and it remains the governing center of one of the poorest counties in Arkansas, sitting at the edge of the Mississippi Delta where the river once ran.