OPINION

OPINION | REX NELSON: Capital of barbecue


I wrote last year about a visit to the remote area of southeast Arkansas where the Arkansas and White rivers empty into the Mississippi River. It's a land unlike anywhere else in our state. To the east, there's the Mighty Mississippi. To the west, there are the tangled remnants of what once was known as the Big Woods, now part of the White River National Wildlife Refuge.

I was there at the invitation of Hal Hunnicutt and Leo Crafton of Conway, who have hunted deer and ducks in the area for years. Hunnicutt, a longtime lobbyist and governmental affairs expert, and Crafton, a dentist, are members of Whiskey Chute, one of the state's most historic hunting clubs. They wanted me to see the club.

It's officially the Blytheville Hunting Club even though it's more than 150 miles from Blytheville. During the first half of the 20th century, deer were scarce in Arkansas. The best place to hunt was in these bottomland hardwoods of southeast Arkansas. The area also had the last remaining native bears.

Blytheville in northeast Arkansas was booming back then. Mississippi County was said to grow more cotton than any other county in the country, and vast fortunes were made. Wealthy cotton planters and merchants from Blytheville had the time and money to make the long trip to southeast Arkansas each winter.

As we talked about the history of the club, Crafton and Hunnicutt mentioned that I had once declared Blytheville the barbecue capital of Arkansas. I explained that it's because Blytheville has more good places to eat barbecue per capita.

"That's our next road trip," Hunnicutt said.

So it was that we found ourselves on the road to northeast Arkansas a few months later. We can no longer eat four or five sandwiches on the same day--all three of us could have pulled it off in our younger days--so we limited our stops to the city's most famous barbecue establishments, Dixie Pig and Kream Kastle.

We started at Dixie Pig, a direct descendant of the Rustic Inn, a restaurant in a log cabin where Ernest Halsell began selling barbecue in 1923. Halsell came from Pontotoc, Miss., in the early 1920s.

Soon before Buddy Halsell died, I drove to Blytheville to interview Ernest's son.

"They were finding it hard to raise cotton in those red clay hills of Mississippi due to erosion, and they heard about this place in Arkansas that was growing rapidly as they cleared the forests and started farming," Buddy said.

Blytheville's population more than tripled from 6,447 residents in 1920 to 20,797 in 1960. Blytheville was to that era what Washington and Benton counties are now--a place where it seems the growth will go on forever.

Ernest took advantage of those population increases. He left the log cabin with its sawdust floor for a larger stone building in 1930. A 1938 Rustic Inn menu on the wall of the current Dixie Pig lists "barbecue pit pig" as "our best and most famous sandwich."

In the barbecue restaurants of Blytheville (you can add Benny Bob's and Yank's to the mix), the distinctive style of barbecue sandwich that sprang up is known as the pig sandwich. It features finely chopped pork, chopped cabbage in vinegar and an almost clear blend of vinegar and spices for the sauce.

The 1938 menu includes chili, hot tamales and four brands of beer from St. Louis--Budweiser, Falstaff, Cook's and Hyde Park. Fortune's Ice Cream was sold for dessert. The barbecued pig plate was 40 cents.

Buddy was one of six children. All of them worked for their parents. Ernest would oversee the barbecue pit, and his wife Tina would be at the cash register. Ernest sold the Rustic Inn in 1946 so he could return to farming. In 1950, he constructed a building on North Sixth Street in Blytheville and called the restaurant Dixie Pig. He brought the same style of sauce and same way of smoking pork that he had used at the Rustic Inn.

Buddy's son Bob now mans the barbecue pit, the same one used since the restaurant was built. The pit can hold 14 pork butts. Bob averages smoking eight to 10 a day.

The second stop with Hunnicutt and Crafton was Kream Kastle, which was started in July 1952 by Steven Johns, a son of first-generation Lebanese and Syrian immigrants.

"In its early days, Kream Kastle was a high-volume/low-overhead hot dog stand," writes Arkansas historian Revis Edmonds. "As the menu expanded, so did its transition to a full-fledged drive-in. Before outdoor speakers, Johns employed car hops who wore white uniforms in all weather. Later, covered parking and an intercom system were added. The Kream Kastle promoted its hot dog, the staple that began and sustained the business, as 'deliciously seasoned with our chili and chopped onions.'"

He sold six of them for $1.

"Johns added barbecue in 1955, taking a gamble in a market that was already saturated with barbecue," Edmonds writes. "Johns ran a special 'pig sandwiches for 69 cents and six for $1 on Sunday nights' and had such a volume that he couldn't keep up with the demand. To help him on the special's final day, the Dixie Pig's Buddy Halsell brought him two fully smoked pork shoulders.

"In communities dealing with the first incursions of national chains, it wasn't unusual for local business owners to join in an arrangement of mutual support. In the 1960s, Johns' health began to fail, and family members operated the business until his death in 1979."

Johns' daughter, Suzanne Johns Wallace, and her husband, Jeff Wallace, took over the business in 1986. They're still at it 36 years later.


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.


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