Category: 2010

Nov172010November 17, 2010November 19, 2014by itswebteam

Thanksgiving & Holiday Hours, plus our 2nd Annual Holiday Open House

Posted in 2010, holiday christmas, Holiday hours, Holiday open house, Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Holiday
Limited Hours on November 24 (Day before Thanksgiving). Staff will be onsite for tours at 10 a.m. until Noon.
Closed for the Thanksgiving Holiday – November 25 and 26;  Resume regular hours on November 29th

2nd Annual Holiday Open House
We are busy getting ready for the Holidays at Lakeport. With the Friends of Lakeport, we have began putting up the Christmas decorations and are preparing for the 2nd Annual Holiday Open House, Saturday, December 4 at Lakeport from 11 a.m. – 2 p.m.

We will again celebrate the Season with classic holiday arts & crafts and holiday refreshments.  Bring the family and enjoy hot apple cider, Christmas cookies, spice cake, music and tours of the historic Lakeport Plantation home.  And, with our special connections, we will again have a special jolly guest.


Christmas/New Year Holidays 
Open limited hours on December 20, 21, 22, 27, 28, 29 and 30 (Staff will be on-site for tours at 10 am and 2 pm);
Closed December 23-26, 31 and January 1, 2;
Resume regular hours on January 3.



Sep202010September 20, 2010November 22, 2016by itswebteam

Another Season of Cotton

Posted in 2010, agriculture, cotton, history, statistics

One of things that makes Lakeport special is the continued cultivation of cotton around the home.  With the home still in its original surroundings, its link to the past is ever-present.  In 1831, Joel Johnson left Scott County, Kentucky with 23 enslaved laborers for Chicot County.  The enslaved laborers slowly carved a plantation out of bottomland hardwood forests.  By 1850 the Lakeport estate contained 4,013 acres, 132 slaves, 20 horses, 34 mules, and 85 cattle.  It produced 4,000 bushels of corn, 475 bales of cotton (400 lb), 300 bushels of potatoes, 300 bushels of sweet potatoes, and 20 bushels of peas and beans.  

Green Fields of Cotton, July 22, 2010

The fields of cotton provide a beautiful backdrop to Lakeport and its agricultural history, but we should also think about how much Lakeport changed in the past 160 years; Plantations are no longer diversified centers of agriculture.  Lakeport is strictly in cotton now.  There are no mules, horses, or oxen and no corn is grown to feed those beasts of burden.  And rather than grow their own food, cotton farmers today likely buy their food at grocery stores like Sunflower or Yee’s Food Land in Lake Village.  Cotton plantations have also gone through several stages:  slave-based labor to sharecropping and tenant system to mechanization today. Where it took hundreds of laborers and animals to grow a season of cotton in 1850, today it requires a handful of workers, plus tractors, fuel, and cropper dusters that spray for pests and the defoliants that reveal the white bolls of cotton that we see in September.

Cotton Picking, September 16, 2010
Crop picked and half the field brush hogged, September 20, 2010