Cotton Plant is burning. Literally.
This newspaper reported late last month that someone has been setting fires at the homes of police officers and firefighters in that Woodruff County town while also vandalizing their vehicles. It's the latest indignity for a Delta town that in 1920 was the home of five sawmills and the largest veneer factory in Arkansas. There also were four cotton gins, a cotton compress and a number of large cotton warehouses.
The population in the 1920 census was 1,661, and peaked at 1,838 in 1950. Now it's a third of that. Cotton Plant had 649 residents in the 2010 census and may be far below 500 by the 2020 census. In other words, it's rapidly becoming a ghost town.
It seems as if the news that comes out of Cotton Plant these days is always bad. In the words of those rural philosophers who used to sing weekly on the television variety show Hee Haw: "If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all."
The town's name speaks to the cotton economy that so long ruled this state. Paula Harmon Barnett explains the name in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture: "William Lynch arrived from Mississippi in 1846 and built a house and a store. Beside the store, he planted cottonseed that he had brought from Mississippi, and it flourished. The plant was a novelty in the area and created much interest. People soon began calling the community Cotton Plant."
The railroad came to town in 1881. By 1890, Cotton Plant was shipping out almost 2,000 tons of cottonseed and 7,000 bales of cotton annually. In 1915, a girl who would become one of the first gospel superstars--Sister Rosetta Tharpe--was born at Cotton Plant. It was the hub for that part of the Delta, a place where wealthy planters and cotton merchants built opulent homes.
"In the early 1900s, Cotton Plant was a cultural center," Barnett writes. "The Frances Opera House provided entertainment. Several music and literary clubs were organized, and residents gathered for balls, dances and performances. Many were proficient in piano, violin and vocals. ... Today Cotton Plant has no industry and few businesses, and the city struggles economically. Much of the historic downtown has been demolished, and only a few of the fine old homes remain."
A similar story could be told in rural towns across Arkansas, especially in the Delta. They were towns that relied on the hundreds and sometimes thousands of tenant farmers and sharecroppers who lived within a 10- to 20-mile radius. Those farmers would come to town on Saturdays to sell crops, shop and perhaps even eat out or go to a movie if they had extra money. Old-timers tell of a time when the stores would stay open until 10 p.m. on Saturdays and the streets would be filled with people. As agriculture became mechanized and tens of thousands of Arkansans left the farm in search of a better life, the towns that served them began to dry up. In the Delta, racial issues also played a role. Cotton Plant was an example of that as white families left during the 1960s and 1970s for places such as Des Arc in Prairie County.
One of the frustrations of the four years I spent working for the Delta Regional Authority was the fruitless search for ways to turn around places like Cotton Plant in the knowledge-based economy of the 21st century. Towns spring up in certain places for economic reasons. When there's no longer an economic necessity for those towns to exist, they will die.
In February, the DRA announced that it had made an emergency grant of $37,721 to Cotton Plant to repair the city's water filtration plant. The filtration system was damaged by a fire in January. That grant was good news for those who still live there, but it won't do anything to ensure growth going forward. It's akin to patching a leaky roof rather than replacing it.
Following an economic study of parts of eight states that was conducted while I served at DRA, we concluded that those towns that grow will be the "critical mass communities." Such communities tend to have a hospital and either a two-year or a four-year institution of higher learning. It's not politically popular to say that there's little hope for growth in many rural communities. The easy answer for officeholders is that with proper government support, all places can grow. Economics dictate otherwise.
In a sobering front-page story in the May 27 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg wrote: "As jobs in manufacturing and agriculture continue to vanish, America's heartland faces a larger, more existential crisis. Some economists now believe that a modern nation is richer when economic activity is concentrated in cities. ... By the late 1990s, the shift to a knowledge-based economy began transforming cities into magnets for desirable high-wage jobs. For a new generation of workers raised in suburbs or arriving from other countries, cities offered diversity and density that bolstered opportunities for work and play. Urban residents who owned their homes saw rapid price appreciation."
"The gap is opening up and will continue to open up," Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, told the newspaper when asked about the growing rural-urban divide. Arkansas, where urban areas in the northwest and central regions thrive, isn't immune to this trend. If you visit a place like Cotton Plant, in fact, you'll swear that Arkansas is Exhibit A.
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Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 06/14/2017