Cash’s boyhood home in running for historic listing

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas — The boyhood home of country music icon Johnny Cash is being considered as a nominee for inclusion on the United States’ National Register of Historic Places.

The Arkansas Historic Preservation Program’s review board is considering 14 state properties for nomination to the list of the nation’s historic places.

The nominations include the Cash home that was built in 1934 in Dyess in northeastern Arkansas, 48 kilometres northwest of Memphis, Tennessee.

The house and 40 acres were provided to the Cash family as part of a federal government economic recovery program during the Great Depression.

Preservation Program spokesman Mark Christ told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that a final decision on whether the property is included on the list will be made by the National Park Service.

“They go through a rigorous internal determination of eligibility before going to the [Arkansas] board, so if a nomination makes it through both of those processes, it’s definitely a property that should be listed,” he wrote in an email to the newspaper.

The home, which is under the control of Arkansas State University, would not have qualified for nomination without the completion in 2014 of a restoration project that brought it back to its 1934 appearance, said Ruth Hawkins, director of the university’s Heritage Sites.

The home was sold by the Cash family in 1954. Subsequent owners installed panelling, wallpaper and modern tile-flooring, which had to be torn out, Hawkins said. Most of the original material was still there, she said.

“The house retains much of its original 1930s vernacular/ Colonial Revival design,” the nomination form says. “The property retains the feeling of a farmhouse from the 1930s-era Dyess Colony.”

Cash was born in 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas, according to the official website devoted to the musician. His family later moved to Dyess.

Cash began his music career as a rockabilly singer in Memphis, on the same Sun Records label as Elvis Presley, and is a member of both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The house in Dyess, Arkansas, where Johnny Cash lived as a boy, is among 14 state properties under consideration for a place on the list of the United States’ historic places.

School books sit on a chest in a bedroom of Johnny Cash’s former home. The home, built in 1934, was sold by the Cash family in 1954.