James Sevier Conway was a founder of Lafayette County and the first governor of Arkansas. In 1823 he began a successful plantation in the rich soils near the Red River, and in 1826 he married Mary Jane Bradley, who had moved to the area as a child. In 1828 he built a plantation house, boat landing, and commissary at Port Conway on the Red River and was named postmaster. Born in 1796 in Greene County, Tennessee, he arrived in Arkansas in 1820 to make land surveys, settled in the Lafayette County area in 1823, and began acquiring what became a large cotton plantation. President John Quincy Adams chose him in 1825 to survey the state's western boundary between the Red River and the Arkansas River, President Andrew Jackson appointed him in 1831 Commissioner of the Arkansas Territory to identify and survey the state's southern boundary, and in 1832 he was appointed to the newly created office of Surveyor General for Arkansas Territory. From 1836 to 1840 he served as Arkansas's first governor, then returned to Walnut Hill, the plantation house he built here after his term. When the Conways' young daughter died of pneumonia in 1845, he chose this quiet spot near his home for the family cemetery so he could be close to her, and two weeks later his young son was also buried here. Today, more than forty members of the Conway and Bradley families are buried here. The plantation was later sold, but the family retained the cemetery. In 1977 the ten acre cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places, in 1984 it became part of the Arkansas State Park System, and in 1986 Conway Cemetery State Park was dedicated in honor of Arkansas's first governor.