Archusa Creek Water Park

🏆🏆🏆🏆 Piney Woods Recreation — 1,600-acre water park and recreation area surrounding Archusa Creek Reservoir in the pine hills of southeast Mississippi — the park features a sandy swimming beach, nature trails through longleaf pine forest, and excellent crappie and bass fishing! The Choctaw people originally named this area.

Visitor Information

Getting There

Located near Quitman in Clarke County on Highway 145. The 420-acre lake provides excellent bass and bream fishing. Clarke County sits in the transition zone between the Gulf Coastal Plain and the Piney Woods — a landscape of red clay hills, creek bottoms, and mixed pine-hardwood forests. The park’s 21 RV sites have full hookups.

Plan Your Visit

Archusa Creek Water Park provides a relaxed Mississippi outdoor experience with 21 RV sites featuring full hookups, tent camping, and a 420-acre fishing lake stocked with bass, bream, and catfish. The park’s nature trail winds through bottomland hardwood forest — tupelo, cypress, and sweet gum trees draped with Spanish moss. Quitman (the county seat) hosts the annual Clarke County Fair each October. Open year-round; catfish biting is best April through September.

Nature & Wildlife

The 420-acre lake supports largemouth bass, bluegill, channel catfish, and crappie — Mississippi’s five most popular game fish. The surrounding bottomland hardwood forest harbors wild turkeys, white-tailed deer, and the occasional Mississippi kite — an elegant raptor that hunts dragonflies on the wing. Red-eared sliders and yellow-bellied sliders bask on logs throughout the lake. Beaver lodges are visible along the creek channels feeding the reservoir.

Insider Tips

Piney Woods: Archusa Creek sits in Mississippi’s Piney Woods — the longleaf pine belt that stretches across the Deep South. Pro tip: Mississippi has the highest poverty rate in the US — but also some of the richest musical heritage. The blues, born in the Mississippi Delta, influenced virtually all American popular music. Choctaw: The area was Choctaw homeland — the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek forced their removal on the Trail of Tears.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did the blues start in Mississippi?

The Mississippi Delta — the flat, fertile plain between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers — is where the blues was born. Enslaved people’s field hollers, spirituals, and African musical traditions evolved into the blues in the late 1800s. Legendary musicians (Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, B.B. King) came from the Delta. The blues migrated north to Chicago and influenced rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, jazz, and country. Every genre of American popular music traces roots to the Mississippi Delta.