Built around 1859 by Lycurgus Johnson on land his father Joel Johnson had cleared in the 1830s using 23 enslaved laborers, Lakeport grew into one of the Arkansas Delta's most profitable cotton operations, forcing more than 150 enslaved people to work over 4,000 acres by 1860. It is the only remaining antebellum plantation house on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River. Most enslaved laborers were field hands, though some worked as masons, carpenters, and household servants, laboring six days a week under conditions documented in Arkansas State University's ongoing research. After emancipation, Johnson negotiated wage labor and sharecropping arrangements with many of his formerly enslaved workers, a transition the site's exhibits use to trace the throughline from slavery through sharecropping to modern agriculture in the Delta.