On a Thursday morning earlier this summer on the campus of Ouachita Baptist University at Arkadelphia, a group gathered to dedicate the new home of the Ben Elrod Center for Family and Community. For almost two decades, the center has helped instill an ethos of community service into the school's students while celebrating the legacy of Elrod, a former Ouachita president who's now retired in North Little Rock.
Elrod hails from a prominent south Arkansas family with roots deep in the pine woods of Cleveland County. His memories provide insight into the development of that part of our state. Elrod once described his hometown of Rison as a place "with a population of about 1,206 or 1,207, depending on how everybody was getting along." He had the benefit of an extended family that he described as including "my mom and dad, all of my grandparents and an abundance of aunts and uncles."
The bank where Elrod's father worked failed in the early years of the Great Depression, and his father wound up as the local postmaster for a time before taking a job with the Federal Land Bank as an appraiser. Elrod says: "My mother was pretty well the disciplinarian. She was the one who answered the day-to-day questions from me. My father was away all week. He would come in on Friday, stay the weekend and then leave on Sunday night or Monday morning. He decided that he was tired of that traveling, and he bought a little sawmill that we called the groundhog sawmill. These were mills that could be moved to the timber supply. He started his own business that way, and it ultimately employed 400 to 500 people in Rison. He had quite a going business there."
The Texas & St. Louis Railway, commonly known as the Cotton Belt, had given rise to Rison. Former state historian Wendy Richter described the Cotton Belt route as one that "spurred development of the modern timber industry of southern and southwestern Arkansas by creating access to the region's vast pine forests. Completion of the line in 1883 changed Arkansas, making major cities out of towns such as Pine Bluff and Texarkana. New communities sprang up along the rail line as well, including the town of Fordyce."
The Southwest Improvement Association, a subsidiary of the railroad, set aside a parcel of land for homes in Cleveland County in 1883. Rison was incorporated in 1890. The Cleveland County seat was moved to Rison from the community of Toledo in 1891. Elrod and Rufus Buie wrote for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture: "The railroad remained Rison's point of reference for decades. Rison on the Cotton Belt was the affectionate way residents referred to their community. The commercial value of the railroad was felt from the beginning. The economy depended on the production of cotton, lumber and a wide variety of wood products, including pulpwood, piling, pallets, broom handle squares, ammunition boxes and U.S. Army pup tent poles."
Several cotton gins operated in and around Rison when Elrod was a boy. But with the soil becoming depleted after having the same crop grown on it year after year, landowners in the region began turning more to harvesting pine trees than raising cotton. The Clio Lumber Co. mill was built in 1887 five miles north of Rison. According to a 1909 issue of Lumberman's Magazine, the Clio mill owned several thousand acres of timberland and had 432 employees in the sawmill, 130 on the woods crew and 80 working the tramlines used to transport logs. Other mills in the area were operated by the J.L. Sadler Lumber Co., the C.L. Garner & Sons Lumber Co. and the Elrod Lumber Co. By the 1950s, the company owned by the Elrod family employed almost a third of Rison's population.
"I can remember that my family did a lot of bartering," Elrod says. "We had a lady who would bring us milk and eggs. In return, we bartered something to her. Such bartering went on all the time because everybody was poor."
During his senior year in high school at Rison, Elrod considered attending the University of Arkansas, the school from which his brother had graduated. He was concerned, though, about the lack of religion courses since he had decided he wanted to be a Baptist minister.
"We had an interim pastor who was enrolled at Ouachita along with his wife," Elrod says. "They talked with me about Ouachita, and I got interested through them. My first contact with the school was to call Dr. J.R. Grant, who was the president, and tell him I was interested and wanted to look into the possibility of attending. He gave me an appointment to come to Arkadelphia. I drove over, visited with him and decided to attend. That was about it. It was a pretty simple transaction." So it was that Elrod found himself in the fall of 1948 at the Southern Baptist institution that had been founded in 1886 with 235 students.
Little could the freshman from Rison have known that he would end up spending much of his career at Ouachita, in two stints as vice president of development and then as president from 1988 until 1997, when he stepped down to take on the title of university chancellor. Elrod had accepted the job at age 57 when some of his friends were already taking early retirement. He explained at the time: "I have always had my greater joy in my work. Work has never seemed to be a drudgery to me. It has always been a pleasure."
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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the director of corporate communications for Simmons First National Corp. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 08/05/2015