Listing Through Life

During the Great Depression of the 1930’s, the federal government established nearly 100 resettlement communities around the country (12 in Arkansas). Resettlement Colony No. 1, in northeast Arkansas, was the largest, with about 500 families. When William Dyess, Arkansas administrator for the WPA (Works Progress Administration) was killed in a plane crash, the settlement was renamed to honor him.

16,000 acres of Arkansas swamp were drained by 125 miles of ditches. 68 miles of gravel road constructed, with 24 major bridges and smaller bridges across drainage ditches in front of every house. A house and farm out buildings were erected on each site, but the work of clearing the trees, brush, and snakes off of the property was left to the individual homeowners. Once eligible farmers passed an extensive evaluation and physical exam to prove they could be productive, they were given a house and an interest-free mortgage ($100/year). They were on probation for one year.

Johnny Cash was born in Kingsland, Arkansas in 1932. His father Ray was a sharecropper, and when he heard that he could own his own land in the Dyess Colony, he moved there with his family in 1935. Their house was wired for electricity and had plumbing fixtures, but while the Cashes lived there, they had neither electricity or indoor plumbing.

A two center was located a little more than two miles by road from the Cash’s house, with a community center, schools, a hospital, a cotton gin, coop store, and cafe. The administration building is still there and now housed a museum on the colony. The coop store and cafe on either side of it burned down. On the site of the cafe, a theater and pop shop was built, which now houses the visitor center.

We arrived a few minutes too late for the 10:00 tour, but that gave us the better part of an hour to tour the visitor center and museum.

At 11:00, we followed our guide out to the Cash house. Our guide was a Dyess native whose grandfather was one of the original colonists. He was a nice guy and knew his stuff about the colony and about Johnny Cash, but his Arkansas accent took some getting used to.

The house is one of only five still in existence. Other people lived there after the Cashes, but it then fell into disrepair until Arkansas State University bought it in 2011 and restored it. Johnny’s sister Joanne served as a consultant on the project.

The house had five rooms for seven people.

Much of the furniture in the dining room, the quilts on the beds, and other pieces belonged to the Cashes while they lived here. The piano in the front room was Johnny’s mother’s. The whole family would gather around and sing gospel songs.

We were at the house maybe 40 minutes and enjoyed it thoroughly. We found the information about the Dyess Colony every bit as interesting as the stuff about Johnny Cash.

This museum tells the history of the Walnut Ridge Army Flying School that operated on an airfield here for two years during WWII. Just after I arrived, a torrential rainstorm swept through, so I wasn’t in any hurry to leave.

When I walked in, there wasn’t anybody around anywhere. I started to look around. Maybe five minutes later, a guy showed up and said hello. He said his wife usually gives tours, but she hurt her leg and was back in the office. If I had any questions, I could go back and ask her.

It’s a typical small-town museum with tons of uniforms, weapons, and other artifacts that people saved as souvenirs of the war. But parts of it were interesting because it told a lot about the local history, and because it focused on the experiences of individual people and their stories. Some were of people who died in the war. Others were survivors or even workers at the flying school. Here are just a few.

There was a memorial for the 42 men who died while in training at the base.

This is the actual crash truck used on the base to respond to plane crashes.

An entire wall was filled with boards that explained Arkansas’ contribution to the war — munitions factories, training bases, hospitals, P.O.W. camps. It was impressive, especially when I considered that that was all from just one state. The extent to which the entire nation was involved with the war is somewhat staggering.

A few of the items that caught my eye.

After the war, the base was used to store, scrap, and sell no-longer-needed airplanes.

There were exhibits about Vietnam, Korea, the Cold War, etc. I didn’t spend any time on those.

I was there about an hour — I’m sure it would have been more interesting with a tour guide to show me the highlights.

I was talking to the woman behind the counter in the gift shop/visitor center about this and that. A second woman walked out of a back room, sat down nearby, and said, “Is he bothering you?”

I did a double-take and then noticed she was looking beneath the counter where her dog was curled up. Joking, I said, “I thought you were talking about me.”

She replied, “Have you been a pain?”

I said, “I didn’t think so. I didn’t intend to be.”

We all laughed, I got my passport stamped, and I headed out to explore the park, not yet realizing that that conversation would be the highlight of the visit.

It’s a classic BCP park — boat ramp, campground, picnic area on a lake — like so many Arkansas parks. Still, I feel like I have to do something to earn my stamp. I chose the Mockernut Trail, a one-mile loop through the mosquito and poison ivy infested woods along the lake.

It’s called Mockernut Trail because the woods have a lot of Mockernut Hickory trees, so named because the nuts are hard for animals to open and only contain a small, unrewarding nut.

There were some campers in the campground and some fishermen in boats on the lake, but otherwise the park was empty, in part because the swim beach was closed due to high levels of E. coli bacteria.

Here’s a view of the lake from the dam. The main part of the park is on the left.

And that was it. I was drenched with sweat (the winds were straight out of the south — a torrential downpour hit the area about an hour later), gnawed on by mosquitoes, and hungry, so I left.

The current population of Powhatan (pronounced “Pow-uh-TAN” and named after the father of Pocahontas) is 104, but from 1869 to 1963, it was the county seat of Lawrence County. Six (or maybe seven, I was never sure about one of them) buildings have been preserved in their original spots. I started in the courthouse, built in 1888.

The first floor rooms are filled with generic displays about life at the turn of the century. I didn’t bother reading them. The enthusiastic, talkative ranger came out to greet me and informed me that he was the only person on site so there would be no tours of the other buildings. He warned me that there were lifelike mannequins upstairs in the courtroom and not to be scared.

I mentioned to the ranger that the strangest thing about the mannequins was that the two guys behind the desk hadn’t noticed that the woman had no head.

The original courthouse, built in 1873, burned down in 1885. The fire-proof vaults with all the court documents survived and were built into the second courthouse.

The view toward the Black River from the courthouse. The ranger made a point of telling me that the park was in two geographical regions — the courthouse was in the Ozarks, while the buildings at the bottom of the staircase were in the Delta. He also said that the Delta here — the area between the river and the hill — was only 100-yards wide. I mention it here because he seemed to think it was exciting and I thought you might think so too.

The Jail, built of limestone in 1873. It later was used as a movie theater, a canning kitchen, a honey processing plant, and an auto garage.

The Ficklin-Imboden House and Kitchen are, I was told, among the ten oldest structures in Arkansas.

The Commercial Building, built in 1887. It has been used as a telephone exchange, an apothecary, a wagon factory, and attorney’s office, a general store, a residence, and a post office. It’s empty inside because it regularly floods.

The Powhatan Male & Female Academy was built in 1889. Don’t let the name fool  you. It’s just a two-room schoolhouse.

Alas! In 1884, the railroad was routed through nearby Black Rock and took away most of the town’s business. In 1926, the town leaders thought a bridge across the Black River might bring back trade, but since they leveled many of the town’s businesses to build the bridge, the plan didn’t work. The suspension bridge was built high above the river to keep it out of flood waters and so steamboats could pass underneath.

Nothing remains of it but two pillars standing on the bank.

While nothing very exciting ever happened in Powhatan, there was enough to make the park interesting, unlike Davidsonville.

The tag line for this park is “The most important town you never heard of.” That’s a reach. The town that existed here for about 15 years, beginning 1n 1815, was the first platted town in what is not Arkansas, as well as the first courthouse, post office, and land office. It was part of the Missouri Territory then. It took a while to get things going — a postmaster was appointed in 1817, the first courthouse session occurred in 1818, even though the courthouse wasn’t completed in 1822. There may have been as many as 20 houses at the peak. But by 1830, the town was abandoned due to the repeated flooding of the Black River, which ran alongside the town. A ferry operated here until 1930.

Nothing is left of the town — not even ruins or drawings. A long of everyday items have been recovered in archeological digs. Two of the buildings — the courthouse and the post office (they think) have been placed as “ghost” buildings, metal outlines to show where the buildings were and how big they are. Except that they don’t know. They’re just guessing what they looked like. The location of the courthouse is pretty clear — its in a square in the middle of town, but the building they’ve marked as the post office is just a guess.

Here’s the sign that explains what the courthouse looked like and also that they don’t know what the courthouse looked like.

Here’s the post office. Or was it? They don’t know. They just know it was a larger-than-average structure where they found a lot of household items.

I walked through the displays in the visitor center (mostly dug-up artifacts) and strolled through the town site to the river.

It was shaping up to be a muggy day, so I didn’t bother with any of the trails through the woods. Even though there’s some history here, it’s basically a BCP park. That’s my new term for Arkansas state parks that are basically just a Boat ramp, a Campground, and a Picnic area with maybe a few short trails stuck in the corners.

A replica of part of a keelboat in the visitor center — maybe the most interesting thing in the park.