I was at my home in Little Rock on that fateful day of March 1, 1997, when deadly tornadoes cut a swath from southwest to northeast Arkansas. I had joined the staff of Gov. Mike Huckabee on his first day in office--July 15, 1996. By March of the following year, we were in the midst of a contentious legislative session. My youngest son was just more than a month old, and I was enjoying a rare day off.
Early that afternoon, my wife called down from an upstairs bedroom: "They're reporting that downtown Arkadelphia has been destroyed by a tornado." My knee-jerk reaction was: "They always exaggerate things on TV." Just to be sure, I called my parents' home in Arkadelphia. I began to worry when I was greeted by the "all circuits are busy" recording each time I called. About 20 minutes later, our home phone rang. It was my father, who had driven downtown and somehow managed to get through to me on his cell phone. He said: "Talk to the governor right now and tell him to call out the National Guard. Main Street is gone."
I immediately called the Governor's Mansion, and they put me through to Huckabee. I said, "Governor, I just talked to my dad in Arkadelphia ..." He cut me off: "I know. I was on the phone with Sen. Percy Malone. He was standing in the rubble of what had been his business. Get over here as soon as you can, and we'll get to work." We flew the next morning in a National Guard helicopter to Arkadelphia. The view from above was stunning. The F4 tornado--one of the strongest in Arkansas history--had destroyed all or parts of 60 city blocks in my hometown. On the following Tuesday, President Bill Clinton came back to the part of Arkansas where he had been raised. I was assigned to accompany Clinton and Huckabee on their walking tour of downtown.
As a reception at what was then Elk Horn Bank & Trust Co. ended, Clinton told me: "I can't say this publicly, but most towns in the south half of the state would never bounce back from something like this. But Arkadelphia will come back because it has strong banks and two colleges."
I thought about those comments last month when it was announced that a Chinese company with 10,000 employees worldwide--Shandong Sun Paper--will build a $1.3 billion pulp mill near Arkadelphia to create materials for baby diapers and other products. It will be Sun Paper's first North American operation and represents one of the largest private-sector investments in Arkansas history. More than 2,000 workers will be involved in the construction phase during the next three years. The plant will employ 250 people directly, but the largest impact will be from the 400 truckloads of timber the mill is expected to consume each day once it's at full capacity. That timber demand will create an estimated 1,000 additional jobs.
The south Arkansas pine belt is producing timber far faster than it's being harvested. There's an enormous oversupply of pulpwood. Thousands of acres that once were row crops or cattle pastures have been planted in pine, but the needed thinning hasn't occurred due to a lack of demand. There's more timber in Arkansas now than at any point in the past 75 years.
Arkadelphia--the home of Ouachita Baptist University and Henderson State University--always will be a college town first and foremost. What this announcement does, though, is position Arkadelphia and the rest of Clark County at the center of the state's timber industry. Other south Arkansas cities have seen job cuts in the industry for at least the past decade, but Georgia-Pacific in nearby Gurdon already bucked the trend by investing $37 million in its lumber mill, increasing capacity by 60 percent.
Clark County has a long history of being a leader in the timber industry. My father, who owned a downtown business, loved telling the story of the Arkadelphia businessmen who would meet each afternoon for coffee in the 1950s at a drugstore on Main Street. One of the men who regularly joined the group was a wealthy landowner, but one would never know it by the clothes he wore or the things he said. He wasn't one to brag. One day, a new business owner in town said excitedly: "I hear you're a millionaire. Is that true?" The landowner replied: "Well, let me see. I own at least a million pine trees. Would that make me one?"
From 1915 into the 1920s, the Arkadelphia Lumber Co. operated one of the South's biggest sawmills west of Arkadelphia at the company town of Graysonia. Almost 500 employees produced more than 150,000 board feet of lumber each day. Graysonia no longer exists, long since having been overtaken by the pine forests that once provided a livelihood for the hundreds of people who lived there.
In downtown Arkadelphia, the offices of the Ross Foundation celebrate the timber industry. The Ross Foundation was started in 1967 by Esther Ross and her daughter, Jane Ross. Esther's father, J.G. Clark, had been a major owner of timberland. The foundation manages more than 60,000 acres for conservation and charitable purposes. It was a key player in the establishment of the Arkadelphia Promise scholarship program for seniors at Arkadelphia High School, which was among the many factors in Sun Paper's decision. Arkadelphia now appears to be south Arkansas' shining star, living up to the prediction made by President Clinton in those dark days of March 1997.
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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the director of corporate community relations for Simmons First National Corp. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 05/11/2016