East Arkansas swamp
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In 1815 President James Monroe commissioned a public land survey of the Louisiana Purchase. This was the latest chapter in the monumental task of dividing the American wilderness into a neat grid of north-south and east-west lines, a project initiated by Thomas Jefferson during the Washington administration. In many respects it was the ultimate triumph of Enlightenment rationalism over what most would have considered good sense.
The United States Land Office hired Prospect K. Robbins and Joseph C. Brown to establish an "initial point" for the survey. That point was to fall in eastern Arkansas. Brown and Robbins determined its location by fixing the intersection of a north-south line known as a "meridian" and an east-west "base line." When they finally arrived at their point, they found it under several feet of water in a moccasin-infested "sunkland." Unable at the time to fashion a solid marker on the ground, they instead indicated the spot by blazing two sets of gum trees to indicate the meridian and base line. Remarkably, within only three years Missouri would become a state and Arkansas would be declared a territory in its own right.
"The importance of the Arkansas region to the history of the Purchase is emphasized by the aftermath of 1803," writes Elliott West. "By the time those surveyors set that stake in the swamp, settlers had already swarmed into Missouri. Indian peoples in Arkansas, including southeastern tribes displaced by earlier expansions, were feeling a growing pressure from white farmers moving in from the east. Filibustering enterprises had been launched out of the lower Mississippi Valley into Spanish Texas, where authorities increasingly recognized the difficulties of defending the contested terrain against an unrelenting American onslaught. Eventually migration into Texas, much of it passing through Arkansas, would undermine Spain/Mexico's hold there."
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"Over in eastern Arkansas where Monroe, Lee and Phillips Counties join at a common point, is located the point where all surveys have their beginnings."
Charles A. Rankin
Arkansas State Land Commissioner, 1943-1954
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