When noted Arkansas historian Ben Johnson of El Dorado talks about the revolution that's transforming Arkansas, he uses telephone area codes to illustrate what's happening.
"Since 1947, when AT&T established area codes, every Arkansas phone number began the same way: 501," Johnson writes in a new edition of Arkansas in Modern America since 1930, published earlier this year by the University of Arkansas Press. "Early in the 21st century, the state's area-code map revealed a new set of boundaries overlaying the traditional geographical regions.
"In 1997, the North American Numbering Plan Administration assigned the 501 area code to metropolitan central Arkansas and five years later designated 479 for the northwest Arkansas metro corridor. Calls to the remainder of the state, 56 of the 75 counties, began with 870. The need to provide the large urban centers with their own area codes reflected not only population consolidation but also the digital gaps within the state.
"The proliferation of cellular phones in central and northwest Arkansas households exhausted all the possible configurations of phone numbers. The state Public Service Commission anticipated that the 870 service area--more rural, tied more closely to the historic economies and institutions--would need to be subdivided by 2012, but the continued loss of population in many of these counties postponed any new demarcation. Cultural identifications tied to living in the hills, or in the lowlands or along ridges and rivers blurred in a technological era when one's phone number revealed a great deal about life and livelihood."
We have four areas of Arkansas now--booming northwest Arkansas, the growing Little Rock metropolitan area, the thriving Jonesboro-to-Paragould corridor, and everything else. When the results of the 2020 census are released, we'll find that up to 50 counties will have lost population since the 2010 census.
The urbanization of Arkansas is gaining steam. You'll be able to see the results of this continued transformation in congressional redistricting when the geographical size of the 1st District (once largely confined to the Delta) and the 4th District (once mostly confined to the Gulf Coastal Plain of south Arkansas) again grow.
One key to slowing the loss of population in rural Arkansas will be the state's ability to get broadband Internet connections into those areas.
"The appliances and consumer amenities enjoyed by town residents were no longer beyond the reach of rural households in the years leading up to the 21st century," Johnson writes. "Satellite dishes blossomed in front of country houses located beyond cable television lines, and local Internet service providers, the mom-and-pop enterprises of the early digital era, cast a wide net throughout the state.
"By 2000, users impatient with slow speeds and inconvenience discarded the once ubiquitous dial-up modems that had been attached to existing telephone lines. Those households without access to broadband digital service trudged in virtual space on the wrong side of a new urban-rural divide.
"By 2015, the state floundered at the bottom of the connectivity rankings. Only a third of rural Arkansans, compared to slightly over half of rural Americans, were able to navigate the Web at the Federal Communication Commission's minimum broadband standards of 25 megabits per second download speed. On accepting an appointment to the FCC's Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee, an executive for an Arkansas technology company insisted more than idle surfing was at stake: 'There are many unserved and under-served people in our state, and broadband is a huge economic driver.'"
Broadband Internet is to the 21st century what electricity was to the 20th century for Arkansas: Key to the survival of rural areas. It's just that we haven't shown the same zeal for getting broadband into remote areas of Arkansas that those in the previous century showed for getting electricity there.
Johnson writes: "In 2019, Arkansas still had a higher proportion of residents without access to adequate broadband speeds than almost any other state. The Legislature that year modified constraints that kept municipalities from providing broadband service. Under a new measure, the government entities could apply for grants and loans to build infrastructure to speed Internet access to under-served areas. The sponsor of the bill observed that Arkansas stood out in raising roadblocks to widespread broadband delivery."
Arkansas has been slow to follow the trend toward urbanization seen in most other states.
"Arkansas between the grim years of the Great Depression and the advent of a new century moved by fits and starts to become a modern American state," Johnson writes in his introduction to the book. "The state's traditional economy and society gave way slowly, and vestiges remained even with the state's integration into the nation. . . . The Arkansas that Bill Clinton left to begin his presidency in 1993 was far different than the post-World War II state into which he was born. He likely would not have reached the White House if governing a state in which the corrupt politics and narrow economy of that older era had endured. Yet agricultural interests and natural resource industries retained a greater influence and more economic heft than elsewhere.
"Small communities withered, sometimes leaving behind only a name on a roadside sign at the edge of a pine plantation. Neighbors were more likely to see one another on weekends at a favorite catfish buffet or barbecue joint than a town square or local hardware store. Arkansas, however, still ranked as one of the most rural in the nation and trailed only Mississippi among the former Confederate states in percentage of residents not living in towns."
In the 2010 census, 56 percent of Arkansans lived in incorporated towns of 2,500 or more residents. The national average was 80 percent. The average number of Arkansans per square mile was only 64 percent of the national average.
"In contrast to lightly settled Western states where the few towns were separated by empty spaces, Arkansas communities were scattered and numerous," Johnson writes. "Nearly 23 percent of the population lived in towns with 50,000 or more residents, but those centers totaled only nine out of the 541 populated places identified by the Census Bureau. Around a fifth of the state's communities had fewer than 200 people, and these were home to a mere 0.5 percent of the population.
"Even as the state's larger towns claimed a greater share of the population, the total number of places where people resided had continued to rise since 1970 when the census located 476 such enclaves."
The 2020 census will show that the rate of rural population losses is increasing. Dozens of Arkansas communities grew when cotton dominated the economy. Thousands of sharecroppers and tenant farmers would come to these communities each Saturday to shop. Those sharecroppers are long gone. Because there's no economic reason for these communities to exist, many will cease to exist in the years ahead. Such communities are now populated by those too old or too poor to move.
The loss of these communities is the biggest news story in Arkansas right now, one that we don't cover enough at this newspaper. I'm 60, and the Arkansas in which I was raised is already gone. For better or worse--I can make arguments on both sides--there's no end in sight to the urbanization of Arkansas.
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Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 12/15/2019