Date of Visit: 24 February 2024
Hwy 49 south of Blackton, 34.645540, -91.053230
54º windy
People ask about my favorite parks. Even before I visited, I knew Louisiana Purchase State Park would rank in my top 3, and it did not disappoint. Years ago, when reading about township and range lines and how Iowa got parceled out in such neat squares, I learned that while President Jefferson sealed the deal to acquire the land west of the Mississippi, President James Madison, about a dozen years later in 1815, actually ordered the official survey. Madison sent men west to establish the Initial Point as anchor for all future land parcels. These men marked the point 26 miles west of the Mississippi River, north of the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers. From this point, the men used rods and chains to divvy up the land the US government needed to pay veterans of the War of 1812. Today, a monument stone rests in a gorgeous headwater swamp to mark this point.
I found it incredibly difficult to capture the park in photographs, so I encourage you to use the link above to access the park website to get a better sense of this amazing place. The park covers 37.5 acres of mostly swamp over 3 counties, but a spacious, 950-foot boardwalk with interpretive placards makes a small portion accessible by foot. Since I visited in winter, the cypress and tupelo trees showed off their towering, straight stature and flared bottoms. The flared trunks, and for the cypress their knobby knees, help keep them standing tall in water. On this trip, I learned a new geological feature: the “headwater” swamp. Common swamps are “backwater” which fluctuate greatly between flooding and drying out. Headwater swamps maintain a more static existence; they don’t super flood and they don’t dry all the way up. Shallow wetlands, you can imagine that the soil beneath is super rich. So, while there used to be many headwater swamps in the area, almost all have been drained in favor of agriculture. Thank goodness the State Parks preserved this one. The light & shadow, the mirror surface of the still water, and the wind winding through bare branches offered a bit of a haunt to the start of my day.
At the end of the boardwalk, deep in the trees, the monument stone sits as witness to an exact moment of colonization. Surrounded by the wilderness of the swamp, it didn’t slip my mind that I could be awed by the science involved as well as devastated by the damage we managed to do with that science. (Fun fact: In 2002 a new survey using electronics and lasers found that the survey of 1815 was accurate to within one inch!)
Behind the stone in this photo, you’ll see one of 4 “bearing trees” red-tagged at the cardinal directons around the Initial Point. Not pictured, a tree just to the right of here. Dead, decaying and hollowed out in vertical striations, it sang when the wind blew across it. The vibrations brought to mind an orchestra of winds, reeds, and strings. While I definitely want to return in summer to see the place alive in green, traveling in winter meant I only met three other people all together on the boardwalk, and each respected the cathedral-like specter of this untranslatable space.
Next up: Mississippi River
