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Ten cities around Arkansas this year celebrate the centennials of their incorporations as City & Town looks back at their beginnings and future.
By Dacus Thompson, League staff
Turn of the 20th century Arkansas and turn of the 21st century Arkansas are like distant and estranged brothers: familiar in basic makeup, but scarcely recognizable as related. Mechanization, industrialization, urbanization and school consolidation have displaced much of the character that communities such as Datto, Griffithville, Winslow, Burdette and Humphrey were founded on and replaced it with a quietude and atmosphere that only distantly reflect the once prosperous lumber and farm towns that threatened to thrive at the turn of the last century. Still other cities are just beginning to realize their possibilities. Take Lowell in northwest Arkansas. It is a 21st century boomtown with its new homes and accessibility to modern shopping centers and restaurants; it has quintupled in population in the last decade. While others, such as the Delta community of Dell, haven't grown much in size over past 100 years, but have improved leaps and bounds in community mindedness. This year, 10 Arkansas municipalities celebrate their centennial. From the river city of Calico Rock to the mountainous community of Winslow to the southern Arkansas municipality of Emerson, Arkansas is getting older. And it's changing more than some would think. Most of the railways are defunct and waterways these communities were founded on unused, but these towns and cities are finding new ways to survive and, in many cases, thrive. Burdette The Three States Lumber Company forever altered much of the landscape of Mississippi County, and in particular the community Burdette, by harvesting all of the area's timber. From 1898 to 1922, Three States clear cut 17,000 acres of the county and established Burdette to support its extensive logging and milling operations. At that time, according to history buffs, Three States and its first superintendent, Alfred Burdette Wolverton, the town's namesake, deemed the town expendable. Nevertheless, the town prospered and grew. Burdette Plantation was established in the 1920s and the lumber mill town developed into a respectably sized, agriculture-based community. An ice cream parlor, hotel, pool hall, doctor's office, cotton gin, bathhouse and open-air theater and park were part of the burgeoning farming community. Its population nearly doubled in the 1980s when it peaked at 328; today, it's at 129, as in the 1940s and '50s. Mayor James Sullivan heads the city council of Douglas Caldwell, W.M. McKinney, Scott Sullivan, Lafonce Latham, Gary Webb and Greg Predmore.
Calico Rock When early explorers traveled the White River from the Mississippi, they discovered colorfully blotched limestone bluffs. They became a landmark for lumbermen who harvested the 40-foot cedar trees. Keel boats, paddle wheelers and steamboats rigged like floating palaces-The Dauntless, Josie Harry and Lady Boone-traversed the winding White River and cut their way through the Ozark foothills before landing at what had become known as Calico Rock. Commerce flourished in the river town in the mid-to-late 1800s with cotton and lumber leading the way; button blanks-shells cut in circles from the abundance of river mussels in the area, were also exported. A post office in 1851 was open for one year before closing, but the one that opened in 1879 is still selling stamps. In 1902, the railroad came burling through the northern Arkansas river-bottoms, blasting whatever got in its way in the name of progress. Many calico-colored bluffs were destroyed. But the name endured. When the community incorporated in 1905, it became-and still is-the only U.S. city named Calico Rock. Hotels, banks and businesses closely followed the railroad. They were too close, in fact: In 1923, a spark from a passing locomotive burned down 21 buildings in two hours. With the help of the Missouri Southern Railroad, the city was restored and the population grew until it hit a plateau at around 1,000 in the 1950s. Today, Calico Rock offers the natural with the urban. Bird watching, hunting and hiking are popular; it also has a school, hospital, newspaper-the White River Current and several privately owned shops. The Izard County city aggressively pursues attracting tourists and industry in hopes of keeping its young people at home. Nature is participating in Calico Rock's renewal as the limestone bluffs slowly re-acquire the peculiar calico coloration. Mayor Ronnie Guthrie leads the city council of Bill Killian, Terry Jenkins, Elbert Kizzia, Steven Marsee, Bill Wiseman, Paul Killian, Ricky Knowles and Lance Whiteaker.
Datto At 97 people the Clay County town of Datto is small: It's one of 32 towns in the state below 100 population. It wasn't always that way. Early in the 20th Century, Datto boasted a drugstore, four grocery stores, barbershop, blacksmith, cotton gin and several churches. U.S. 67, completed in the late 1920s, altered Datto's future by locating less than a mile to the east, pulling travelers' attention away from Datto. Lack of jobs in Datto prompted residents to head north to Corning and St. Louis and south to Jonesboro. Today, Datto has a Baptist church, post office and the sturdy, brick remains of the old school. "It was quite a busy little town," said Winnie Harper, who moved to Datto with her husband in 1946 and served as postmaster for 20 years; she retired in 1992. As many towns in northeast Arkansas, Datto was founded because of its abundant lumber. The Day family owned the land in Datto and operated a sawmill until the lumber supply was exhausted. The Days sold lots to farmers and it became a cotton and corn community. "The land was cheap and it's good land, low river ground," Harper said. "Everybody knew their neighbors and everybody was friends and they used to go visiting. And the men would go hunting and fishing and people naturally would move in and out." The farms now are a thousand acres and most of the people work elsewhere in factories, Harper said. "It's a right pretty little town. It's nothing like a big town. We do have sidewalks and blacktop streets and named streets, and we're doing our best to keep it looking nice," she said. No plans are pending to celebrate Datto's centennial. Datto's city council is Harper, Burt Swan, Brenda Banks, Rick Edington and Jeremy Edington, and its mayor is William Tillie.
Dell "If the Pyramids [in Egypt] would've been located right outside of Dell, the farmers would've tore 'em down just to get an extra acre of cotton," Dell Mayor Kenneth Jackson said of the cotton-grown community, which at one time in the early 1900s had five cotton gins on one street. This all came after the U.S. Corps of Engineers turned the woody swamplands surrounding the Pemiscot Bayou into habitable land by installing drainage. After the timber was cleared and the swamps drained, some of the richest soil in the world was ready to cultivate. "Mississippi County is fertile property, like the Euphrates and the Nile," Jackson said; he added that at one time the county produced more cotton than any other county in the United States. To celebrate the municipality's 100th birthday, Dell is inviting everyone who was born, raised or graduated high school in Dell to "come back home." Jackson said he hopes people from across the nation will return. "It's kind of scary," Jackson said. "Our town's just 251 and I don't know how we're going to hold everybody." The celebration is planned for the first weekend in June. Despite what Jackson describes as Dell's "Mayberry-like" feel, Dell has had setbacks. The city's school consolidation with Gosnell in 1984 "impacted the town greatly," Jackson said. "Your school is the activity center of a small community. Adapting to that is pretty difficult." With clean, neat streets, a noon-time bustling crowd in Camie's Café at Dell's front door, a tidy, paved walking trail through a grove of Cypress trees just behind a quaint city hall and the town's inviting neighborhoods, Dell appears to be doing just fine. Helping Jackson make these improvements are council members Radene Minyard, L.G. Mahan, Harold Rowe, Rodney Cooper and Jackie Reams.
Earle The Arkansas Delta municipality of Earle and a nearby community known as Norvell developed almost simultaneously in Crittenden County, vying for position to determine which of the towns would envelop the other. Watt Road divided the towns physically and the Watt brothers, for whom the road was named, fueled the division ideologically, history records say. The feud culminated in 1904, the documents say, when an Earle landowner, W.M. Brown, was fatally shot by one of the Watt brothers over the proposed move of the post office, which was housed in a Watt brothers' general store, from Norvell to Earle. The St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railroad may not have known about the bitter rivalry, yet determined the towns' fates by running its line through Earle, pretty well sealing Norvell's fate. Merger of Earle and Norvelle was proposed as early as 1913, but did not become official until 1978, although the merger was still opposed by Norvell electors. Earle was at one time the largest city in Crittenden County. Saloons, hotels, grocery stores and theaters buzzed with activity as the cotton gins and lumber mills churned out some of the finest materials in the state, exporting some of its products to Europe. The prospering economy not only allowed for luxuries such as theaters (Earle at one time had three) but sports teams. The Earle Cardinals, a professional basketball team, won five Southern Independent Basketball championships in the 1920s and '30s by winning 204 of 221 games. Earle High School also had Crittenden County's first football team. Today, Earle is mostly a farming community, harvesting soy beans and wheat and cotton. The Crittenden County Museum, located in a restored 1922 train depot in Earle, keeps the city's vibrant history alive; but Earle at its 100th birthday is far less lively than it was at its first. "When I was growing up in the 1930s and '40s," museum volunteer Richard Wood wrote in a letter to City & Town, "it was called 'The Gem of Eastern Arkansas.' But, sadly, [it is] no more." Sherman Smith is Earle's mayor and Sarah Johnson, Robert Malone, Leroy Bowling, Jesse Selvy, Jimmie Barham, Donnie Cheers, Bobby Luckett and Ann Pickering make up the city council.
Emerson The "Biggest Little Town in Arkansas," as its motto says, is better known nationally than it is in state, Emerson Mayor Joe Mullins said. Why? Because of the Purple Hull Pea Festival and World Championship Rotary Tiller Race. The tiller race can claim such a bold title because it is the only tiller race in the world. The race has been covered nationally by networks such as Discovery, The Food Network and CBS and internationally, by a TV crew from Germany in 2004. Mullins, who has participated in radio talk shows from San Diego to New York for the festival, said that the "very unusual town of Emerson" will add a few new spins this year to celebrate the municipality's centennial. A play with a cast of 15-20 that tells the history of Emerson will be staged and the festival's "pea-shirts" will display an emblem noting the 100th. The festival was cooked up in 1990 by satirist Glenn Eades, a former resident of Emerson who wrote fictitious accounts about locals for Magnolia's Banner-News. "We were so boring we didn't even have a cop," Eades said, who added he wanted to shake up the community. Fifteen years later, Emerson hosts one of the wackiest festivals in the nation. The southern Columbia County municipality (just six miles north of the Louisiana border) is doing well financially and benefits from lumber, bromine and chemical industries in the area. "Everybody works here and makes a good living," Mullins said. The town of 359 has been recognized with about every festival award in Arkansas, including the Arkansas Festival Association's "Festival of the Year" award in 2001. This year's PurpleHull Pea Festival is June 24-25. Mullins benefits from having Thomas Talley, Jeffery Horne, Talmadge Faulk, Bonita Ferguson and Terressa Curtis as Emerson's city council. See www.purplehull.com.
Griffithville A few families gathered in the southeastern flatlands of White County in the mid-1850s, but little else found its way to this area because of its inaccessibility-the closest inlet was the White River 10 miles away at West Point. But in 1898, the area's burgeoning lumber industry gave rise to the Rock Island Railroad line from DeValls Bluff to Searcy; the line passed five miles from the community. The nine families in the area decided to take advantage and immediately sawmills were constructed and Griffithville was born. A schoolhouse and bank were built in the early 1900s and the town made the slow transition from a lumber to a farming community. By the 1940s, most of the business and commerce had shifted to Searcy and the main focus of Griffithville became its school. In the 1970s, Griffithville's schools prospered with a new gymnasium and library; the enrollment reached 302. But in 1991, the school consolidated with Riverview and the community began to struggle. "You take the school out of the community and you've done cut its throat, you might say," James Smith, the mayor of Griffithville, said. Few businesses operate in Griffithville today. Dean Dill, Steven Hamm, Windle Porter, Jerry Hamm and Ron Pettypool make up the city council that is led by Smith. Humphrey This Jefferson County city of 806 is mostly a bedroom community for Stuttgart, Pine Bluff and Little Rock. "People live here who don't want to live in a bigger town," said Alderman Michael Hodges, who is a crop-duster and runs a welding and body shop in Humphrey. "It's quiet here, a slow pace. It's kind of back in time, in a way." Humphrey was settled around the Union Pacific Railroad, which now splits the town in half, and generated its early economy from sawmills, a cotton gin, sorghum mill and farming. But those industries, with the exception of farming, have long gone under or moved to surrounding cities, and today the busiest places in Humphrey are the bank, post office and its lone convenience store. Although businesses aren't growing in Humphrey, the city is making strides in improving its community. A new fire station (Humphrey's second) and state-of-the-art water treatment center have been erected in the past two years, and the city is currently in the early stages of rebuilding its old community center, originally constructed in the 1920s. Mayor James Sanders leads the city with a city council of Michael Hodges, Ricky Robinson, Michael Bogy, Tim Bogy, Cleveland Hatch and Ronney Brown.
Lowell This booming Benton County city was one of the fasting growing communities in Arkansas in the last decade, jumping in population from 1,224 to 5,013. Its beginnings are less prodigious. Located along Old Wire Road, Bloomington-as it was known then-is where the Butterfield Stagecoach stopped. The stagecoach was a mail delivery service in the 1850s and '60s that took parcels and letters from St. Louis to San Francisco; the stagecoach often got stuck in Bloomington's muddy trails, thus earning it the nickname Mudtown. In 1881, the town moved slightly west to be near the new railroad; the new town was officially named Lowell, although Mudtown has stuck with the city ever since. Lowell will celebrate the 100th later in the year. The city's rapid growth has sprouted new businesses such as hotels, restaurants and other customer-based ventures that have Mayor Phil Biggers and council members Michael Solomon, Melissa Pool, Matthew Delucchi, Keith Williams, Brad Spurlock, Mitchell Wright, Marty Lathem and Marie Haussermann working hard to stay abreast.
Winslow In the early 1900s, wealthy travelers from all over the country migrated to Winslow for refuge from the summer heat for two reasons: it was the point of some of the most majestic views on the St. Louis-San Francisco railroad line; and because of its elevation (2,000 feet) it was cool. "That was back before air conditioning and all that," said Barbara Ashbaugh, assistant librarian and member of the Winslow Centennial Committee. "Up here we were at least 10 degrees cooler, which doesn't mean much to us now, but it did back then to them." In the following decades, Winslow encountered a series of unfortunate events, aside from the invention of the air conditioner. In the middle of the Depression, half of Winslow burned and was rebuilt; 19 years later, the other half of the city burned, but by that point there was no need to rebuild. The city had mostly lost its draw as a resort. History was made in Winslow in 1925 when the first all-women city council in the United States was elected, just five years after women's suffrage. The business women of Winslow organized and swept the elections. "It was kind of a joke," Ashbaugh said. "After the women decided they would run, the men bowed out." The joke persisted for two terms. Ashbaugh recalled: "The men thought the women would just get together and have tea parties, but they were very serious and did a whole lot for the city during that time ... beautification, repairing the roads and just got some of the things done that needed to be done." They did not run for a third term. The traffic through the mountain town has slowed considerably with Interstate 540 replacing the winding, hilly U.S. 71 as the primary north-south route at the state's western edge. But Ashbaugh said that overall it has probably been good for the community because of safety and because people who want to travel the scenic 71 still do. The scenic railroad is also still in operation, traveling seasonally from Springdale to Van Buren to Winslow and offering sightseers a glimpse of what those century-old tourists saw. Winslow will celebrate its centennial in conjunction with its annual music festival September 16-18. Mayor Randy Jarnagan heads Winslow's city council of Donald Clark, Theresa Seely, Marsha Cooley, Velma Duncan, Barbara Ashbaugh and Freddie Wood.
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