Marked Tree, AR

Marked Tree is a Poinsett County city at the mouth of the Little River where it meets the St. Francis. The name comes from a tree on the riverbank, blazed as a marker for a portage: travelers could walk about 120 yards across land instead of paddling twelve miles upstream. That old shortcut still gives the place its shape better than a generic highway description. The city's river story also includes the Marked Tree Siphons, a 1939 engineering project that lifted St. Francis River water over a levee as part of flood control. Marked Tree is eastern Arkansas in a very specific shape—river junction, portage, floodway, and roads converging at one practical spot.