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Erbie
Erbie Campground is located 7 miles down a gravel road off of Hwy. 7 north of Jasper, AR. The campground has 14 drive-in campsites and 2 walk-in campsites, each with a picnic table, fire ring, and lantern hook. The drive-in sites are suitable for RV or tent camping but the campground has no hookups, no running water, and no dump station. All sites are available on a first come, first served basis. There is a vault toilet at the boat launch. This is a pack in/pack out facility with no trash service provided. Five group sites are available. Group sites #1 and #5 are first-come, first served, while sites 2, 3, and 4 can be reserved by calling the Tyler Bend Visitor Center at (870) 439-2502.
For you hikers and backpackers there are trails are located in the old community of Erbie. There are several ways to get to this area. The easiest way is to travel west off Highway 7, approximately 5 miles north of Jasper, on the gravel Erbie campground access road; however, getting to the trails on the north side of the river will involve fording the Buffalo River on a low-water concrete crossing. During high water periods, the north side can be accessed from the Dogpatch-Erbie road west of Highway 7, or the Compton-Erbie road east off Highway 43 (Newton County Road 19).
The Erbie Trails provide excellent opportunities to visit historic farmsteads, quiet stream valleys, waterfalls, old farm fields, wooded mountainsides, and bluff-top vistas. There are several trails on the north side of the river which may be hiked individually or combined into a loop of approximately 7.5 miles.
The Cecil Creek Trail travels upstream along Cecil Creek to another trail intersection near the foundation of an old church. The faint trail to the right, marked with blue blazes, travels for about a mile to a waterfall area known as Broadhollow Falls.
The trail to the left known as Cecil Bench Trail, climbs out of the creek valley and runs along a bench past an old cemetery and a couple of old home sites. These trails provide wonderful hiking of great variety. The trailhead is located adjacent to the old Erbie Church and provides picnic tables and toilets.
The Cherry Grove Cemetery Loop, just across the river on the south side, skirts old fields and wooded bluffs along the river to the historic cemetery. Elk and Deer frequent many of these old fields along the river in the early morning and evening hours. This trail begins at the Parker-Hickman Farm, the oldest existing farmstead on the Buffalo River.
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So while staying at the Erbie campground check out this beautiful, old farmstead. The Parker–Hickman Farm includes the oldest standing log structure in Buffalo National River. The farm was homesteaded in the 1840s by settlers from Tennessee. It embodies an agricultural landscape with farmstead, extant fields (bench and bottomland), fencerows, roads, cattle gates, garden and orchard plots, wooded slopes and springs. Unlike most farms in the Ozarks the landscape is remarkably intact and provides insights and evidence spanning portions of two centuries of Ozark history; not randomly chosen, it conveys a feeling of enclosure and exemplifies adaptive use of topography. Among farms of its kind in Missouri and Arkansas it was once typical but now survives as a rare baseline example for Ozark yeomanry farms of mixed economies. Parker–Hickman was an agricultural enterprise that continuously operated until 1982 from a farmstead which exemplifies the entire period, and a rare one for the Ozarks since it survives. Clustered around the farmstead are several structures: barns, sheds smokehouse, privy, fences, stock feeders and house that represent a cross-section of rural vernacular architecture still in their original location.
Although other farms in the Ozark–Ouachita region had similar origins, with settlement patterns that evolved from subsistence to commercial agriculture, the Parker–Hickman farm is important because it survived intact. Until purchased by the National Park Service the Parker–Hickman farm continued uninterrupted as an agricultural enterprise for more than one hundred forty-five years, a rare intact survival of a typical southern upland farm in the Ozark–Ouachita region.
