When the subject is duck hunting in Arkansas, most people think of the eastern half of the state. However, some of the oldest and most historic duck-hunting clubs are in an area of southwest Arkansas near where the Little River empties into the Red River.
This waterfowl-rich area of 18,000 acres is controlled by five private hunting clubs--the Hempstead County Hunting Club (commonly known as Grassy Lake), Yellow Creek, Po-Boy, Cypress Bayou and Bee Bayou. The Grassy Lake club was founded in 1897 and owns almost 6,400 acres in these bottomlands. Yellow Creek was formed in 1946 and owns 2,206 acres of bottomland hardwood forest near McNab in Hempstead County (which had a population of just 68 people in the 2010 census).
The clubs flood green timber for duck hunting and also manage their land for deer hunting. Yellow Creek, for instance, has about 25 duck blinds (a few of which have kitchens) for members to use and 20 deer stands. These clubs also feature turkey hunting, squirrel hunting and fishing.
In its February/March 2017 issue, the upscale Southern lifestyle magazine Garden & Gun featured a story in which writer Bill Heavey accompanied noted Arkansas business leaders Randy Wilbourn of Little Rock and Emon Mahony of El Dorado bream fishing on Yellow Creek, which becomes Beard's Lake near Millwood Lake.
"Six of us crammed into a 16-foot skiff with a pail full of crickets and too many rods, trying to fill the cooler for the 'Brim Rodeo,' the annual fish fry that the Wilbourn and Mahony clans have been holding together every spring for nearly 20 years at their hunting camps in southwest Arkansas' Little River bottoms," Heavey wrote. "Some of the clubs here date from the 1890s and are among the oldest in the state. ... The bottoms are like Eden but with bigger mosquitoes--18,000 acres of waterways, swamps and bottomlands.
"They're home to the largest breeding population of alligators in the state, venomous snakes (rattlers, cottonmouths, copperheads and coral snakes), birds like the tricolored heron, the white ibis and the wood stork, and virgin stands of 350-year-old bald cypress."
Way back in 1950, Dwight Moore of the University of Arkansas wrote a paper on Grassy Lake titled "A Biologist's Paradise." Moore noted that the lake is almost three miles long and more than a mile wide in places with an average depth of only three to four feet. He said one cypress tree measured 24 feet in circumference, with many of the trees at least 110 feet tall.
"The lake and adjoining land are owned by the Hempstead County Hunting Club, with members chiefly in Hope, Texarkana and Nashville," Moore wrote. "There's a limited membership, and these well-advised men strive to maintain the lake in as natural condition as possible. On this account, the wealth of plant and animal life is little disturbed and thus renders it a veritable biologist's paradise. But access to the lake is strictly on a basis of special permission from the club.
"The name Grassy Lake has evidently been applied because of the numerous stands of Southern wild rice. This coarse grass grows to a height of 10 to 14 feet in large and small patches throughout the lake. It is in many of these dense growths that the alligators dwell. They may be observed by very cautious approach, but too often the alligators' ears are more sensitive than the observer's eyes, and they slip away, leaving only the traces of their presence in the mud and vegetation."
Moore went on to describe the cottages of club members, the boathouses, the huge oak trees around the cottages and the types of ferns found few other places in Arkansas.
"From the boat landing, marked lanes extend toward various parts of the lake," he wrote. "The more shallow parts of the lake are dominated by buttonbush, which in many places forms dense thickets, even in water several feet deep. On this account, the boat lanes must be marked to ensure the safe return of those who go out to fish or hunt. ... Toward the west side of the lake, there is considerable open water where the cypress trees and buttonbush occur only in scattered bunches. But even here the water is only waist deep."
The hunting clubs in this area received some unwanted attention when members entered into a protracted legal battle with Southwestern Electric Power Co. over the construction of the John W. Turk Jr. coal-fired power station. The 600-megawatt station provides electricity to SWEPCO customers in Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. Construction began in 2008, and the plant was commissioned on Dec. 20, 2012. The construction cost was $1.8 billion.
In a March 2011 story distributed nationally by The Associated Press, Jeannie Nuss wrote: "The barbed-wire fence surrounding the Hempstead County Hunting Club divides more than property lines. It separates rich from poor. On one side: wealthy duck hunters who have preserved a private forested paradise largely untouched by chain saws. On the other: the people of a struggling Arkansas town where jobs are scarce and families live in run-down trailers.
"The hunters are now waging a bitter legal battle over construction of a coal-fired power plant, and the dispute has laid bare the class tensions that have long beset this rural area. Townspeople welcome the new facility because it will bring jobs and valuable tax revenue. Club members fear the plant will spew pollutants that cause acid rain, threatening the pristine hunting grounds they have protected for more than a century."
--–––––v–––––--
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.