Prescott: Prairie, Railroads, and Civil War Battlefields

Prescott sits at the center of a region the French colonists called Prairie D'Ane, a French phrase meaning donkey prairie, a stretch of twenty-five to thirty square miles of rolling open grassland surrounded by pine forest in southwest Arkansas. The French named it before the United States ever claimed this territory. The prairie had long been a crossroads, and when the Cairo and Fulton Railroad came through in the eighteen seventies, Prescott grew up around it as the county seat of Nevada County.

During the Civil War, two significant battles were fought nearby: Elkin's Ferry in April eighteen sixty-four and Prairie D'Ane a few days later, part of the failed Union Camden Expedition. Both sites are now recognized as National Historic Landmarks. Sixteen properties in Prescott and Nevada County are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.