Memory Lane Trail follows the streets and sidewalks of the old Greenville town site through the wooded remains of Old Greenville, a community first settled in 1804, chosen as the seat of Wayne County in 1819, and relocated in 1941 as Wappapello Lake filled behind the new dam. Greenville stood at Bettis Ford on the St. Francis River, where roads to the Old Southwest crossed, and over time it saw cattle drives, westward-moving pioneer families, stagecoach travel, a Civil War skirmish on July 20, 1862, and, in December 1838, the passage of 1100 displaced Cherokee during the 770-mile, 103-day Trail of Tears journey to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. The town reached its population peak between 1900 and 1910 with more than a thousand residents, supported by the Williamsville Greenville & St. Louis Railway and the Holladay-Klotz Land & Lumber Co., but declined after the timber boom ended in the early 1910s and during the Depression, before its people moved the town two miles north and left Old Greenville abandoned.