In 1992, historian James C. Cobb from the University of Georgia came out with a book titled The Most Southern Place on Earth.
The book is about the Mississippi Delta, a region like none other. Plumerville native Rupert Vance, who became a noted sociologist at the University of North Carolina, described the region in 1935 as "cotton obsessed, Negro obsessed. Nowhere but in the Mississippi Delta are antebellum conditions so nearly preserved."
I'm driving south on the stretch of road that I consider the most Southern place in Arkansas--not only geographically but also historically and culturally. I'm on U.S. 165 from Dermott in Chicot County to the Louisiana state line just below Wilmot in Ashley County.
Cotton and other row crops remain king. Along the route are things that have come to represent the Delta in the minds of Arkansans--well-kept homes of farm owners, rundown homes of laborers, the flat landscape, a man selling produce alongside the highway, empty buildings in decaying downtowns that once catered to sharecroppers who no longer live here, Spanish moss dripping from the cypress trees in Lake Enterprise.
About 20 miles to the east is the Mississippi River. Just to the west of the highway is Bayou Bartholomew, the longest bayou in the country. The bayou begins in Jefferson County near Pine Bluff, then heads south through Lincoln, Desha, Drew, Chicot and Ashley counties before entering Louisiana and emptying into the Ouachita River.
"Bayou Bartholomew was, until the construction of railroad lines in the area in 1890, the most important stream for transportation in the interior Delta," writes Rebecca DeArmond-Huskey, who in 2001 was the author of Bartholomew's Song: A Bayou History. "While the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers served their adjoining areas, it was the bayou that provided a transportation route into an otherwise landlocked area. This route allowed the development of one of the richest timber and agricultural tracts in the Delta."
It's likely that the bayou was named after a man known as "Little Bartholomew, the Parisian." He was part of Henri Joutel's 1687 band of French explorers who crossed the bayou before finally reaching Arkansas Post.
"Spanish colonists also took note of the bayou," DeArmond-Huskey writes. "Don Juan Filhiol, commandant of the District of Ouachita in the 1780s, was impressed with its navigation potential as well as the agricultural land around it. The colonists used the bayou for transportation as there were no good roads in the area. They used flatbottom barges, propelled by poling, rowing, cordelling (towing with ropes), or by sails if the wind was favorable.
"The advent of the steamboat made the bayou a major thoroughfare for exporting cotton, timber and other goods as well as for importing supplies. These boats were on the bayou in Morehouse Parish in Louisiana before 1833. All such commerce halted when the Civil War began, but resumed soon after it was over. With the advent of the railroads, steamboat activity began a slow decline, though it continued in Ashley County until some point between 1906 and 1912. ... All steamboating was a treacherous business, but according to Ben Lucien Burman, who boated on both large rivers and bayous, 'bayou steamboating was steamboating at its worst.' The bayou was more narrow and shallow than the river, and pilots had to avoid sharp bends, shoals, snags and overhanging trees."
Dermott thrived in the early 1900s as a railroad town, growing from 467 residents in 1900 to 1,602 in 1910. It reached its highest population of 4,731 residents by the 1980 census, but had fallen to 2,316 by 2010. The town was known for wide, tree-lined streets. J. Tom Crenshaw, the first mayor, and city recorder C.H. VanPatten had oak trees planted along city streets in the 1890s.
Traveling south on U.S. 165, I pass into a corner of Drew County and enter the community of Jerome, which had just 39 residents in the 2010 census. A sawmill town called Blissville was established here at the spot where the railroad tracks met the bayou. The town was incorporated in 1908.
Jerome is best known for having been the site of one of the two Japanese American relocation camps in the state. The other camp was at nearby Rohwer in Desha County. The Jerome Relocation Center operated from Oct. 6, 1942, until June 30, 1944. The peak population of the camp was 8,497.
The route south takes me into Ashley County. I drive through Boydell and into Montrose, which is where U.S. 165 meets U.S. 82.
When most Arkansans think of Ashley County, they picture the vast pine forests and timber industries near Crossett and Hamburg. But, as Steve Teske notes in the Central Arkansas Library System's Encyclopedia of Arkansas, "this eastern part of the county belongs to the Mississippi Delta region, which was home to numerous cotton plantations before and after the Civil War. Dugald McMillan was the first landowner who registered a patent for the land where Montrose now stands. His plantation, like others in the region, employed a large number of slaves, many of whom remained after the war working as tenant farmers for the same landowners. Consequently, African American citizens have outnumbered white citizens in the area from the time slavery ended up to the present time."
The other communities as the trip continues south on U.S. 165 are in Ashley County and are about the same size. In the 2010 census, Montrose had 354 residents, while Portland had 430, Parkdale had 277, and Wilmot had 550.
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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 08/17/2019