OPINION

REX NELSON: The road to England

I left the newspaper office early on that Thursday when the world seemed to be screeching to a halt. I'm a sports fan, and all day long the cancellations had been showing up on my newsfeed-- the conference basketball tournaments, the NHL, Major League Baseball and finally March Madness in the form of the NCAA Tournament. The NBA had postponed its season the night before.

The stock market was in another free-fall. My speaking engagements were starting to be postponed. I do a lot of public speaking, and spring is a busy time. Our youngest son was already home from law school in Atlanta. Our oldest son was on the road that dark day, returning to Little Rock from graduate school in Austin.

I realized that the England Chamber of Commerce's annual banquet that evening might be my last large gathering for a time. To clear my head from the madness spinning around me, I took what I call the scenic route from Little Rock to England. You turn right off U.S. 165 at Scott, pull onto Arkansas 161, then wind slowly along the banks of the Arkansas River oxbow known as Old River Lake.

At Land End's Plantation, the road passes through towering pecan trees on both sides of the road. By summer, the leaves of those trees will form a canopy over the highway, making for one of the most inviting drives in the state.

My friend Brenda Fulkerson--the epitome of the warm, witty Southern hostess--used to invite me to occasional luncheons at her house on Baucum Plantation near Scott. There were few things I enjoyed more than sitting in a home in the middle of a cotton field, talking politics with intelligent people and eating meals that usually included peas from the garden, sweet squash relish and cornbread.

I described these luncheons as an "Arkansas salon" in which interesting Arkansans would discuss topics of the day over good food. The events were an attempt to continue in some small way the storied tradition of the daily luncheons that the late Witt Stephens would host in his downtown Little Rock office.

A major condition of these luncheons was that they were off the record. I miss those days and thought about them as I passed the turn to Colonel Maynard Road, which I would take to Baucum Plantation.

I turned onto Arkansas 161 and also found myself missing the original Cotham's, which had been housed in a wooden building built in 1917. The piers that held the old mercantile store, which burned in May 2017, still rise from Horseshoe Lake. The store had long served farmers in the area.

In 1984, a dining section was opened to serve lunch to those farmers. Soon, politicians and Little Rock businessmen discovered the place. When I was living in Washington and covering Congress in the late 1980s, then-Sen. David Pryor first told me about Cotham's.

I didn't stop on this day, but the state's Plantation Agriculture Museum is one of my favorite museums in Arkansas. It gives the visitor a sense of the vital role that cotton cultivation played in our state's history. The main part of the museum is in a brick building that was built in 1912 by Conoway Scott Jr. for a general store. In 1929, a wing was added to house the Scott post office.

In the 1960s, plantation owner and seed developer Robert L. Dortch bought the building and began turning it into a museum that would help visitors experience life on a cotton plantation. Dortch even began operating an excursion train. I can remember my parents taking me to ride the train, which later was moved to Eureka Springs.

Dortch died in 1972, and the museum closed in 1978. A powerful member of the Arkansas Legislature from Lonoke County, Rep. Bill Foster, began trying to convince the state take over the facility. Foster's bill was approved by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Bill Clinton in 1985. The Plantation Agriculture Museum opened in 1989.

After Amendment 75 to the Arkansas Constitution (the 1/8-cent sales tax) was approved by Arkansas voters in 1996, some of the proceeds from that tax were used to resurrect the Dortch cotton gin. The building was rebuilt, but the 1920s Munger cotton gin and press inside are originals. The state also restored one of Dortch's seed warehouses. Dortch gained a national reputation for the cotton and soybean seeds he developed.

William Scott came from Kentucky to the area that would become Scott. His son, Conoway Scott Sr., was born in 1815. By 1862, the family owned almost 2,000 acres and 10 slaves. Conoway Scott Sr. died in 1866 shortly before the birth of his son Conwoway Jr. The younger Conoway would go on to operate the family's plantation and general store.

When the St. Louis & Southwestern Railroad (later known as the Cotton Belt) crossed his land, what was called Scott's Station became a regular stop. The sign there was later shortened to just Scott, giving the town its name. As nearby cotton farms grew in size, additional general stores opened.

Land's End was developed by the Alexander family, which came to this country from Scotland in the 1700s. James Alexander was a captain during the American Revolution. Nathaniel Alexander later served as governor of North Carolina. Other Alexanders served in the North Carolina Legislature. President James K. Polk was an Alexander descendant.

The most prominent early settler in this area was Chester Ashley, who acquired a sizable tract of land and maintained a residence known as Ashley Mill Plantation. In December 1844, Ashley was selected to fill the U.S. Senate vacancy created by the death of William S. Fulton. Ashley served in the Senate until his own death in April 1848.

In 1898, what had been the Ashley property was purchased by Arthur Lee Alexander, who had come to Arkansas with three cousins in the 1880s. One of those cousins was Asheville, N.C., native J.R. Alexander, who found work as an overseer of plantations near Scott. He saved his money (and borrowed some from Col. Thomas William Steele) in order to buy 640 acres seven miles south of Scott. That was the beginning of Land's End.

In 1901, J.R. Alexander married a Virginia native named Evelyn May Crump. Upon arriving from Virginia to experience what must have seemed like a foreign land for such a blueblood, she declared that this "must be the end of the land." Thus Land's End.

The plantation would grow to cover 5,000 acres. J.R. Alexander was nationally recognized as an agriculture expert and spoke across the country about cotton and livestock. He served in the Arkansas Legislature and was urged to run for the U.S. Senate in the 1920s. Alexander decided to focus instead on promoting advanced agricultural practices. He delighted in taking legislators on tours of the state's agricultural colleges.

His wife, meanwhile, focused on building and furnishing the Tudor Revival-style house that long has been the plantation's centerpiece. She died before the house was completed in 1927 at a cost of $85,000. The couple had three children. The oldest, Bob Alexander, was educated at Vanderbilt and came home after receiving a degree in chemistry to operate the plantation until his death. His son, James R. "Jim" Alexander (who died at age 73 in June 2018), later owned the plantation.

The home, which can clearly be seen from Arkansas 161, was designed by architect John Parks Almond, who's best known for his design of Little Rock Central High School and the Medical Arts Building in downtown Hot Springs. Almond personally selected the stones for the house at Land's End from Pinnacle Mountain near Little Rock.

After passing Land's End, I drove for a time along the Arkansas River levee before the road took a hard left through huge fields. In those fields, men were driving tractors to prepare the soil for spring planting.

In the face of the coming pandemic, hope still sprang eternal for these farmers as they worked in advance of that evening's storms. I had one last speech to give at England, a speech that would be followed by long, anxious days at home.

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Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Editorial on 03/29/2020

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