In 1856 John Sumner laid out the townsite for Lake Village, situated on the shore of Lake Chicot. Lake Village became the fourth county seat of Chicot County in 1857; the first two, Villemont and Columbia, had been washed away by shifting course of the Mississippi river. The third one, Masona, was too far from the river for business activity. In 1923 American aviation history was made at Lake Village. Charles Lindbergh, then an unknows aviator, made his first night flight from a nearby cotton field, enroute from Saint Louis to Houston.
