The road is straight and the countryside is flat as I drive east toward Marked Tree on Arkansas 14. It's difficult to imagine that there was a time when this land was covered with trees.
Northern investors, having cut out the virgin forests surrounding the Great Lakes, came to Arkansas in the 1880s and began clearing the bear-filled woods. The period of Arkansas history known as the Big Cut lasted from roughly 1880 until about 1930.
Those investors made money then departed for the Pacific Northwest, where more virgin forests awaited. Arkansans were left with cut-over land and streams filled with sediment. Granted, a handful of Arkansas residents became rich as they drained the land, cleared the stumps and began growing cotton. The vast majority of residents of this area, however, worked as tenant farmers and sharecroppers with their souls owed to the company store.
I'm in Poinsett County. Crowley's Ridge, which still has trees, runs through here. I came off the ridge at Harrisburg and am back in the Delta. The county had just 1,720 residents in the 1870 census. The coming of the railroads changed everything as timber was shipped out and cotton plantations were formed.
By the 1890 census, Poinsett County's population had more than doubled to 4,272. It continued to grow due to the need for labor on the farms--7,025 in 1900; 12,791 in 1910; 20,848 in 1920; 29,695 in 1930; 37,670 in 1940. The population has been falling since 1950, when there were 39,311 residents, and was down to 24,583 by the 2010 census. It will be smaller still when this year's census is concluded.
The story of Poinsett County is the story of much of east Arkansas--steady growth from the 1880s until the rapid mechanization of agriculture following World War II, the loss of population since then, no end to the bleeding in sight. East Arkansas long ago ceded the role of the state's economic and political powerhouse to central and now northwest Arkansas. The broad economic trends that have stripped this land of its people aren't something I expect to see reversed in my lifetime.
"The coming of the railroads in the early 1880s drastically affected the economy of Poinsett County," Clyde Ford writes for the Central Arkansas Library System's Encyclopedia of Arkansas. "The growth of the county had been stalled by the inability to get products to market. The county contained vast natural resources but had no practical way to market them. The only river that was used for commerce was the St. Francis, located in the eastern part of the county. Some people opposed the railroad, especially hunters who thought the trains scared the animals. But it came nonetheless.
"In 1881, the Texas & St. Louis Railway Co. began laying the county's first track through the towns of Weiner and Fisher. The track, a narrow gauge, was finished the next year. In 1882, the St. Louis & Iron Mountain Railway came through the center of the county and serviced Whitehall, Harrisburg and Greenfield. In 1883, the Kansas City, Fort Scott & Gulf Railway came through Tyronza and Marked Tree on the east side of the county. The cities along the tracks grew rapidly. More sawmills came, and the harvest of the timberland began in earnest. The timber industry expanded rapidly because the timber could now be more easily moved to market. The railroads connected the wilderness of Poinsett County to the large industrial centers. The trains took thousands of furs out of the county, shipped cattle to market in St. Louis and carried cotton and lumber to the mills."
I enter Marked Tree, which as far as I know is the only community in the world that has that name. The town is between two rivers--the St. Francis and the Little--which are separated by less than a mile. Workers settled here from 1881-83 to build the railroad. The first post office, which opened in March 1883, was in an abandoned steamboat tied to the new depot. By 1890, with the railroad fully functioning, there were sawmills.
The town obtained its name from an oak tree on the banks of the Little River that was marked with a big M. Legend has it that the mark was left in the 1830s by John Murrell's band of outlaws from Tennessee. An 1890 flood washed the tree into the river.
Ernest Ritter, who founded E. Ritter & Co. in 1889, began efforts to incorporate the town. That petition was granted in 1897. Ritter family descendants remain prominent in this part of Arkansas. By 1893, the Chapman & Dewey Lumber Co. owned more than 100,000 acres. The company employed 300 men in Marked Tree by 1902. As the timber supply was depleted, employment at the lumber companies started to decline and the size of the cotton plantations began to grow. Drainage districts were formed in the early 1900s. Marked Tree was in Drainage District Seven, which grew to include 190,000 acres.
The Great Flood of 1927 hit Poinsett County harder than any other county in the state.
"Though residents were able to relocate their livestock to the high ground of Crowley's Ridge, more than 200,000 acres were under water at the worst phase of the flooding," Ford writes. "Thousands of sharecroppers and their families were rendered homeless. Many historians believe that this flood and its impact upon poor sharecroppers played a role in the creation of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, one of the few interracial unions in its day. It was founded in Tyronza to advocate for the rights of sharecroppers and tenant farmers to earn a reasonable living, in contrast to the abuse and poor pay they often received from plantation owners."
The levee at Marked Tree broke on April 15, 1927. It broke again in 1937. In response to those floods, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the Marked Tree Lock and Siphons on the St. Francis River. The lock was completed in 1926 on an abandoned channel of the river nine miles from Marked Tree. The siphons--tubes that are nine feet in diameter and 229 feet long--are 646 feet away from the lock and carry water over a levee. They began operation in June 1939.
Before leaving Poinsett County on my way to Dyess in Mississippi County, I pass through Lepanto, which like Marked Tree was a product of the railroads and timber industry. These days it's better known for its appearance in the made-for-television movie A Painted House, which aired on CBS in April 2003.
For five weeks in the fall of 2002, crews from Hallmark Hall of Fame Productions were here to film the movie, which was based on a book of the same name by John Grisham. The famous novelist had been born at Jonesboro in February 1955 and raised near Black Oak in Craighead County. The story was set in 1952 Arkansas and was a departure from Grisham's usual legal thrillers.
"There is not a single lawyer, dead or alive, in this story," Grisham wrote. "Nor are there judges, trials, courtrooms, conspiracies or nagging social issues."
Grisham visited the set twice during the filming, and his father was there even more often to ensure its accuracy. Grisham drew sketches of the house he wanted used, and the set designer and his crew built the five-room house. It was later dismantled and taken to Hallmark headquarters in Kansas City. The house was returned to Arkansas in May 2003 after a group called Citizens for a Progressive Lepanto raised money to have it brought back and operated as a museum.
Though farming has changed greatly since 1952, one thing remains the same: The wealthy landowners are powerful but few in number. Their operations have grown even larger. The sharecroppers, meanwhile, have been replaced by machines, and their small houses have disappeared from Delta roadsides.
The muddy St. Francis continues to flow to the Mississippi, and the Marked Tree Siphons still do their job.
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Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 03/01/2020