Bayou Bartholomew

About

Bayou Bartholomew — Longest Bayou in the World. The bayou's story begins in deep time. When the Arkansas River jumped its banks and moved east roughly two millennia ago, it left behind the channel that would become Bayou Bartholomew, draining the Mississippi Alluvial Plain across the Gulf Coastal Plain. Long before any survey crew mapped it, the corridor flowed through the ancestral territory of the Quapaw, the Caddo, the Osage, the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Tunica. For those peoples the river served as a primary travel corridor, a fishing ground, and a gathering place — a role reflected today in the enduring cultural connections and treaty-protected rights maintained by the Quapaw Tribe, the Caddo Nation, the Osage Nation, and their neighbors.

The bayou took its name in the early 19th century from Dr. Robert Crittenden, brother of the Kentucky politician John J. Crittenden, who lived in the area. By the 1830s the channel had become the principal steamboat route between the Ouachita and the Arkansas River, and it held that station through the 1860s. The 1849 founding of the town of Bartholomew — now Sterlington, Louisiana — marked the high point of bayou commerce, and steamboats worked the water long after: the Adella Lee ran the bayou as late as 1900. Throughout the 1800s, this waterway ranked among the most important in the Delta region, carrying the commerce of a country still measured by water rather than rail.

The surrounding forests fed a second economy. From the 1820s through the 1920s, crews logged the bayou's cypress, shortleaf pine, and oak to supply the 1850–1910 Arkansas lumber era, the expansion of the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway and the Missouri Pacific Railroad, and the cross-tie and barrel-stave industries. Drew County sawmills and Bayou Bartholomew logging drives were among the major operators. Large-scale cutting ended with the 1910 exhaustion of the old-growth stands, the 1915 start of state forestry conservation, and the 1930s creation of the Ouachita and Ozark National Forests.

Science arrived alongside industry. The USGS Arkansas Survey worked the region from the 1890s into the 1920s, establishing Bayou Bartholomew gauging stations in the first decades of the 20th century and producing the first comprehensive hydrological assessments of the basin. Later Clean Water Act assessments and, more recently, the Arkansas Department of Energy and Environment's Total Maximum Daily Load program have tracked the accumulated marks of a century of logging, agriculture, and industry.

That working past has given way to quieter pursuits. Since 2010, the ADEE and the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission — in partnership with the Bayou Bartholomew Watershed partnerships and the Quapaw Tribe — have pursued streambank stabilization, native fish restocking of largemouth bass, crappie, and alligator gar, and Arkansas Water Plan implementation. The bayou remains an outstanding warm-water fishery, and its Trophy Bass Season runs April through May. Designated a state water trail, the Bayou Bartholomew Water Trail now draws paddlers to a string of put-ins — among them the Dr. Curtis Merrill Access, the Cane Creek Access, and the Little Bayou Wildlife Management Area Access. What once moved freight now moves canoes, and the old channel endures, still flowing toward the Ouachita as it has for two thousand years.