Arkansas packs a lot into a small map. The Natural State holds the only national park you can take a thermal bath in, the only public diamond mine in the country, and the high school where the civil rights movement forced a nation to watch.
I spent my career teaching history before visiting these places with my sons, and Arkansas keeps the hard stories and the joyful ones side by side. The 15 landmarks below run from 1,000-year-old mound complexes to a museum built by a Walton fortune.
Here is our ranked list of the best landmarks and historic sites in Arkansas, counting down to number one.
Arkansas Landmarks At A Glance
A quick guide before you go. The headline sites spread across the state, so most travelers build a loop rather than a single base.
117 public lands destinations are under threat. Get the free briefing that 27,000+ people use to stay informed and take action.
| Landmark | Type | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Little Rock Central High | Civil rights site | Little Rock |
| Hot Springs National Park | National park | Hot Springs |
| Clinton Birthplace Home | Presidential site | Hope |
| Buffalo National River | National river | Northern Ozarks |
| Pea Ridge Military Park | Civil War battlefield | Garfield |
| Crater of Diamonds | State park | Murfreesboro |
| Fort Smith NHS | Historic forts | Fort Smith |
| Arkansas Post Natl Memorial | Colonial site | Gillett |
| Blanchard Springs Caverns | Cave | Mountain View |
| Toltec Mounds State Park | Indigenous site | Scott |
| Louisiana Purchase State Park | Survey marker | Brinkley |
| Rohwer Memorial Cemetery | WWII incarceration site | Rohwer |
| Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum | Submarine museum | North Little Rock |
| Parkin Archeological Park | Indigenous site | Parkin |
| Crystal Bridges Museum | Art museum | Bentonville |
15. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Funded by Walmart heir Alice Walton and opened in 2011, this Bentonville museum holds American art from the colonial era to today, all set in glass pavilions over a spring-fed ravine.
Admission to the permanent collection is free. The Moshe Safdie architecture is reason enough to visit.
14. Parkin Archeological State Park
This state park preserves a Native American village occupied during the Mississippian period, roughly AD 1000 to 1600. Many researchers believe it is the town of Casqui that Hernando de Soto visited in 1541.
The grounds, a National Historic Landmark, sit along the St. Francis River where the old village stood.
13. Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum
On the river in North Little Rock you can tour the USS Razorback, a World War II submarine with one of the longest service records of any sub in the world.
It served the U.S. Navy and later the Turkish Navy before coming home to Arkansas as a museum ship.
12. Rohwer Memorial Cemetery
During World War II the U.S. government imprisoned thousands of Japanese Americans at the Rohwer incarceration camp in the Arkansas Delta. Most were citizens held without charge.
The cemetery and its monuments are now a National Historic Landmark. Actor George Takei was held here as a child, and he has helped tell its story.
11. Louisiana Purchase State Park
A boardwalk through a headwater swamp near Brinkley leads to the stone that marks the starting point for surveying the entire 1803 Louisiana Purchase.
From this single point, surveyors mapped the 800,000 square miles the deal added to the country.
10. Toltec Mounds Archeological State Park
The name is a 19th-century mistake. These earthworks near Scott were not built by the Toltecs of Mexico but by the Plum Bayou people between roughly AD 650 and 1050.
The site, a National Historic Landmark, preserves some of the tallest surviving Native mounds in Arkansas.
9. Blanchard Springs Caverns
Near Mountain View, this is the only cave system in the country administered by the U.S. Forest Service. It is still living, with water shaping new formations.
Choose the easy Dripstone Trail or the longer Discovery Trail, both guided, to walk through the lit chambers.
8. Arkansas Post National Memorial
Founded by the French in 1686, Arkansas Post was the first European settlement in the lower Mississippi Valley. It changed hands among France, Spain, and the United States.
Now a National Park Service memorial near Gillett, the quiet grounds hold the layered history of the people who lived and fought here.
7. Fort Smith National Historic Site
This site preserves two 19th-century forts: the first Fort Smith, built in 1817, and the second Fort Smith, built in 1838 nearby. The second later held the courtroom of Judge Isaac Parker, the hanging judge.
It also marks a starting point of the Trail of Tears, where the forced removal of Southeastern tribes passed through. Tour the courthouse, the jail, and the reconstructed gallows.
6. Crater of Diamonds State Park
Near Murfreesboro sits the only diamond-bearing site in the world open to the public for digging. The 37-acre plowed field is the eroded surface of an ancient volcanic pipe.
Whatever you find, you keep. Visitors pull real diamonds out of this dirt every year.
5. Pea Ridge National Military Park
In March 1862, Union forces under Samuel Curtis defeated a larger Confederate army here, securing Missouri for the Union for much of the war.
The battlefield in northwest Arkansas is one of the best preserved in the country, with a drive that traces the two days of fighting.
4. Buffalo National River
In 1972 the Buffalo became the first national river in the United States, protected free-flowing for 135 miles through the Ozarks.
Towering bluffs, clear water, and quiet float trips make it the state’s outdoor centerpiece. Elk roam the valley near Ponca.
3. President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site
In Hope you can tour the modest two-story house where Bill Clinton, the only U.S. president from Arkansas, lived as a young boy with his grandparents.
The National Park Service preserves it as the start of an unlikely path from small-town Arkansas to the White House.
2. Hot Springs National Park
Protected as a federal reservation in 1832, decades before Yellowstone, Hot Springs is one of the oldest preserved areas in the system and became a national park in 1921.
The thermal water still feeds the grand bathhouses of Bathhouse Row. You can soak in the same springs that drew visitors for generations.
1. Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site
Our number one is the school where, in 1957, nine Black students walked through a mob and an Army cordon to integrate a white high school. The nation watched on television.
Central High is still a working school and a National Historic Site. The visitor center across the street tells the story of the Little Rock Nine and the federal showdown that backed them.
Plan two hours: start at the visitor center exhibits, then walk to the school and the preserved Mobil gas station where reporters filed their stories in 1957.
More Things To Do
With the landmarks covered, the Natural State earns its name. A few more ways to spend your time:
- Float or paddle a calm stretch of the Buffalo National River.
- Catch live music in Mountain View, the folk music capital of the state.
- Hunt for your own gem at Crater of Diamonds after a rain.
- See Arkansas’s national park sites for more protected history and land.
You should know that this guide does not come out of thin air. My sons Will and Jim have spent their adult lives exploring America’s national parks and public lands destinations.
Will and Jim have worked with the National Park Service, the Department of the Interior, the USDA, and the U.S. Forest Service creating films on the places and issues that matter. In 2018, after a career teaching history, I joined them to help tell the stories behind these sites.
