East Arkansas Trip Planner

Welcome to East Arkansas!

Nicknamed “the Natural State,” Arkansas is a place of dense forests, rolling foothills and fertile plains, and nowhere is its moniker more appropriate than in East Arkansas. The region, which is formed partly by the Mississippi Delta and partly by the Ozark Mountains, is home to a bevy of state parks, lakes and scenic drives. Lake Chicot State Park at Lake Village is the state’s largest natural lake—it measures some 20 mi (36 km) in length—while Greers Ferry Lake at Heber Springs is renowned for its record-setting trout fishing and environmental cleanliness. Crowley’s Ridge Parkway, a 200-mi (360-km) scenic byway along the Delta’s highlands, passes through Jonesboro and includes Civil War sites as well as national forests, and in Brinkley, the Louisiana Purchase State Park commemorates the historic 1803 land deal and the starting point of the surveys that followed.

East Arkansas also enjoys a well-preserved folk scene that has been handed down from those early settlers. Mountain View boasts a folk school, an annual folk festival and free evenings of music and dancing, while West Memphis puts on a Hillbilly Hoedown and a Gumbo Fest. Film and modern entertainment aren’t left out of the mix. Batesville annually hosts an Ozark film festival and Pine Bluff extols the state’s famous sons and daughters—Johnny Cash, Billy Bob Thornton and John Grisham to name a few—at the Arkansas Entertainers Hall of Fame.