WYNNE -- Local history museums across Arkansas can let a visitor's imagination travel back in time to explore the allegedly Good Old Days -- as illusory as that concept may be. In some cases, there is the wistful discovery of how much farther a dollar went in years past.
At Cross County Museum & Archives, that point is made by a framed full-page advertisement dated June 1, 1939, from the Wynne Daily Star-Progress. It listed prices for several dozen items at the local Kroger store, including some for produce that seem amazingly low eight decades later.
A whole watermelon was 59 cents, with "30-lb. avg. guaranteed." A cantaloupe, "extra lg. guaranteed," was 15 cents. Seedless grapefruit was priced at four for 15 cents, while iceberg lettuce went for 5 cents a head, and fresh asparagus ran 7 1/2 cents a bunch.
Picnic hams were 15 cents a pound. A one-pound bag of marshmallows sold for 10 cents. A two-pound jar of raspberry or strawberry preserves was 29 cents. A quart of Embassy salad dressing (type unspecified) was 22 cents. The ad announced, with a wisp of excitement: "just arrived 1,000 pounds delicious fig cakes!" -- which does sound like a huge amount of fig cakes for what was then a town with 3,600 population.
Also posted is a full-age ad from Big Star grocery, in the Wynne Progress dated June 6, 1968. By then, the price of iceberg lettuce had risen to 13 cents a head. A one-pound bag of marshmallows cost 29 cents. Semi-boneless ham was 69 cents a pound. Frozen food had arrived in grocery stores, bringing fish sticks advertised at 59 cents a pound.
Any excitement about those rock-bottom prices is tempered, alas, by the statistical fact that today's U.S. consumer price index is 17 times higher than in 1939 and 6 times higher than in 1968. Still, a museum time traveler can dream.
The yellowing ad pages for Kroger and Big Star are hung next to a model of a general-store counter manned by a cheerful-looking clerk. Lest too much nostalgia emerge, there are also exhibits reminding visitors of the persistent hard work involved in the Good Old Days. One example is a wringer washing machine of the sort that occupied some of a typical housewife's time nearly every Monday of the year.
Cross County Museum & Archives is housed in a former four-room elementary school built in 1937 during the Great Depression by the federal Works Progress Administration. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Also on the National Register is Wynne Wholesale Commercial Historic District, one of the smallest such districts in Arkansas. It encompasses five buildings, four of which are actually classified as historic. They were built during the first half of the 20th century.
Wynne Municipal Waterworks, erected sometime between 1904 and 1908 before being altered in the 1940s, is fitted out with stepped parapets adorning the front and back of the structure. The red-brick Wynne Wholesale Grocery Building, dating to 1917, is irregularly shaped with five sides. Its windows feature a segmental arch shape at the top.
The R.J. Gin Company Cotton Gin is notable as the only remaining gin in Cross County. Built around 1940, its steel-frame skeleton is clad in corrugated sheet metal. Sharp Floral Building, constructed in the late 1940s to house a wholesale flower business, features five 28-pane metal casement windows.
However small, Wynne's historic district remains, as the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture describes it: "The most intact and consistent example of Wynne's early wholesale commercial development near the intersection of the north-south and east-west branches of the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railroad."
Cross County Museum & Archives, 711 E. Union Ave., Wynne, is usually open 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday-Friday. Admission is free, with donations welcome. Visit cchs1862.org or call (870) 238-4100.
Style on 10/09/2018