Over the years, the name Lakeport has been applied to a number of things here in the Arkansas Delta.
If you look on a contemporary highway map you’ll see the name Lakeport beside a dot near the Mississippi River just south of U.S. Highway 82. This marks the spot of a steamboat landing from which thousands of bales of cotton were shipped down river to New Orleans.
If you look at a slightly older map you will see the name applied to a large plantation established before the Civil War by a man named Joel Johnson from Kentucky.
More recently the name Lakeport has been given to the house built on the plantation in 1859 for Joel's son, Lycurgus, and his wife, Lydia Taylor Johnson. Their descendants remained there until it was sold to Sam Epstein in 1927.
This Lakeport Plantation House is the only remaining Arkansas plantation home on the Mississippi River. Today you can tour it, thanks to a gift in 2001 to Arkansas State University from the Sam Epstein Angel family.
