Louisiana Purchase State Park: Where America Doubled

In the summer of eighteen hundred and three, the United States purchased approximately eight hundred and twenty-eight thousand square miles of territory from France for fifteen million dollars, roughly three cents an acre. It was the largest land transaction in American history, and it more than doubled the size of the country overnight. The deal was negotiated without Congressional approval, which worried Thomas Jefferson enormously, but he signed it anyway.

The territory had to be surveyed, and that meant establishing a fixed starting point. In eighteen fifteen, surveyors Prospect Robbins and Joseph Brown set out into the swamps of northeastern Arkansas, working through terrain that resisted them at every turn. What they were looking for was the precise intersection of the baseline and meridian lines that would anchor all future land surveys in the region. They found it here, in a cypress and tupelo swamp in what is now Lee County, Arkansas.

The spot they marked became the Initial Point for the Fifth Principal Meridian, a reference from which all land in Missouri, Iowa, and large portions of Arkansas, Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota was eventually surveyed and recorded. Every land grant, every homestead claim, every farm title, every city plat in those states ultimately traces back to this location in this swamp.

Arkansas established a state park here in nineteen sixty-one to preserve the site. A boardwalk now carries visitors nine hundred fifty feet through the cypress swamp to the original stone marker. The swamp looks largely as it did in eighteen fifteen: dense, dark, and indifferent to human claims. The marker sits on a small island, inside a stone pyramid. The land the surveyors were standing on when they placed it is now permanently flooded.

The Louisiana Purchase State Park is one of the few places in America where you can stand at the origin point of a legal system that governed the ownership and transfer of millions of acres across half a continent. It is also simply a beautiful and unusual swamp.