DYESS -- If anyone else had grown up there, the small wood-frame house wouldn't garner a second look. Standing alone off a gravel road among acres of farmland without anything else nearby, the house seems lonesome at 4791 W. County Road 924, about 50 miles southeast of Jonesboro.
But company's coming. And lots of it.
This 1,120-square-foot white clapboard house with forest green shutters and window boxes, be it ever so humble, is where country music legend Johnny Cash spent his formative years. Those involved in the project say the Historic Dyess Colony restoration and Johnny Cash Boyhood Home museum hope to draw approximately 50,000 visitors annually, bringing nearly $10 million in tourism-related income to the region.
During the Aug. 16 grand opening, more than 600 visitors toured the house museum. A line of those waiting to walk through snaked from the front door, down the wooden porch and along the sidewalk.
"This is a dream come true to see it open and altogether transformed," says AJ Henson of Bartlett, Tenn., a childhood friend of Cash's. Henson moved to Dyess when he was 4 and Cash, then known as J.R., was 3.
"I knew him first from church and then from school and from the third grade on, we were in the same class," he says. The two remained lifelong friends, visiting through the years. Cash visited Henson when he was in the Army and later when he wed in Colorado, Cash and June Carter attended his wedding.
"This house becoming a museum contributes to the community and adds economic value because of its tourist draw," he says. "And it brings back memories for all of us who are connected to Dyess."
Dyess Colony was established when 500 families -- including the Cash family -- were selected to live there as a part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1930s Depression-era agricultural resettlement colony. As part of the New Deal program under the WPA (Works Progress Administration), destitute farmers were advanced 20 or 40 acres of farmland, a mule, a small house, and money to buy food and plant crops, with the understanding that if they made money, they were to repay the government. Those who shared the experience bonded.
"I've never seen any group of people closer like family than those in Dyess," Henson says, adding that he believes Cash, who he says never put on any airs, would be proud of the restoration.
Johnny Cash's parents, Carrie and Ray, moved there in 1935 from Kingsland (Cleveland County). The couple had seven children and lived there until 1954. Cash, who died in 2003, moved out of the house in 1950 when he joined
the U.S. Air Force.
On the day of the museum's grand opening, a morning dedication ceremony took place at the front entrance of the Dyess Administration Building with remarks by Cash's relatives -- sister Joanne Cash Yates, his brother Tommy, and his daughter Roseanne.
Following the ceremony, attendees boarded shuttle buses to visit the five-room house. Throughout the day, a steady stream of visitors ambled through the small rooms, marveling over the authenticity and attention to details found within.
In the living room, a handmade quilt in progress hangs from a rack on the ceiling. But the centerpiece of the room is the family's original piano, which the Cashes brought from their home in Kingsland to this one. It eventually found its way to the Dyess Community Center before being donated back to the home when it became a museum. Family photographs are displayed atop it on a crocheted runner and beside an oil lamp and a vase of flowers, while antique hymnals sit on the piano. In the children's room, a small wooden table holding an oscillating fan and a coal oil lamp stands between a pair of black iron double beds topped with old handmade quilts. The parents' room is similarly furnished, while the small bathroom features a pedestal sink and a cast-iron tub, but no toilet.
The kitchen is filled with antique cooking equipment including a wood-burning stove, while the dining room features an ice box, complete with a sign in the window to let the ice man know what size block of ice the family needed.
The house was bought by Arkansas State University in April 2011 for $100,000 and that fall -- the day after the debut Johnny Cash Music Festival, which benefited the restoration project -- Cash's younger sister Yates toured the house and shared memories of the way it originally looked. In February 2012, when the beginning of the restoration was officially celebrated with a ceremony, work had already begun on rebuilding the foundation. The house was placed on a trailer and moved to the back of the lot while a new foundation was created. That involved digging down eight feet to remove all the gumbo soil from under the house and replacing it with better draining soil, pouring a new below-ground concrete foundation and covering it with soil, placing the historic concrete piers on the hidden foundation, and setting the house back on its piers.
"The restoration cost $310,750 with most of that spent to stabilize the foundation," says Ruth Hawkins, director of Arkansas Heritage Sites at ASU-Jonesboro, who oversaw this restoration and others, including Lakeport Plantation in Lakeport and the Hemingway-Pfeiffer House Museum & Educational Center in Piggott.
"All of the work is essentially complete, though we are still working on various aspects, such as landscaping the yard, restoring the linoleum floors, and insulating under the house," Hawkins says.
Most of the physical work to restore the house was completed in the fall of 2012. A call for donations of period furnishings and household items like those that once filled the home brought in some $60,000 worth of items and returned the interior close to its original appearance.
There are just a handful of odds and ends left to be acquired, Hawkins says: "We are still looking for a flour barrel and a narrow back porch table. It would also be nice to add some 1940s clothing hanging in the closets."
The house museum (visit dyesscash.astate.edu/) is open from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. The cost for the tours, which begin on the hour at the Dyess Colony Administration Building, which holds an exhibit, is $10. For now, there is temporary parking at the house site, but plans call for a shuttle bus to transport visitors between the two.
The Administration Building was donated to ASU by the city of Dyess in October 2010 and restored using grants from the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council, for a total of about $1.5 million.
"We also utilized $250,000 of a $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the exhibits in the building, which focus on the development of Dyess as an agricultural resettlement colony during the New Deal, the lifestyle of typical colonists, and how growing up in Dyess [affected] Johnny Cash and his music," Hawkins says, adding that the exhibits occupy the north wing of the building while the municipal offices for the City of Dyess have moved into the south wing.
A $750,000 grant from the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council will be used to rebuild the historic Dyess Theater, which currently only has its facade remaining. Once built, the theater will serve as a visitor welcome center and include a gift shop, show an orientation film, display other exhibits and have office space.
Meanwhile at the house, work will begin to re-create a barn, a smokehouse, a chicken coop and an outhouse, Hawkins says.
"We also will be building another colony house to the west of the Cash house [in the exact location where another colony house once sat] that will serve as a caretaker facility, as well as providing visitor services such as parking and restrooms," she says. "Ultimately, we also hope to develop a walking/biking trail between the house and the colony center."
Mary Lacey, 57, was there to see the house and also explore her genealogy. Her grandparents Fay and Glenie Allen were a part of the original 500 colony families. Coming from Centerville (Yell County), they lived on one of the properties adjoining the Cash family.
"My family members have told me it was like a jungle; the soil had a lot of moisture in it like a swampland," Lacey says of her relatives, who lived there until 1940.
Lacey is pleased with the restoration.
"It's beautiful," she says. "It was very emotional for me going into the kitchen because my grandmother's kitchen was very much like this one. The people who lived here were such frontiers. This is such an important part of Arkansas history, of American history."
Others touring the house during the grand opening included Francine Cox of Magnolia, who went to school with Yates. Francine and her brother, Larry, remember living across the field with their family in another Dyess Colony house, which burned when Francine was 9.
"The dirt around here was so muddy you couldn't walk 10 feet without washing it off," Larry Cox recalls. "It was glued on; I shook my boots off many a time."
At the early morning dedication ceremony at the Dyess Administration Building before the grand opening, Yates also spoke of the thick gumbo soil and recalled when her family was traveling through Hoxie and found a nice big flat rock to haul back home. They set it by the back door and used it to scrape their shoes on when coming in from the fields.
Gesturing to the nearby slab of rock on display for the dedication, Yates said she and her husband had been keeping it with them during the restoration but that today, it would return to its proper place in the backyard of the house.
Yates said, "But the greatest things we had in our home were unconditional love and faith."
Style on 09/23/2014