The ghosts of Dyess

I’m the only driver on a ruler-straight stretch of Arkansas 14 on a lazy Saturday. I’m going a bit over the speed limit as I head east out of Lepanto while listening to college basketball on the radio. I make a hard right onto Arkansas 297 and within minutes find myself at Dyess.

This was tough, unforgiving country when Ray and Carrie Cash moved their family here in 1935, leaving behind their friends and relatives in the south Arkansas pine woods of Cleveland County.

Planters such as Robert E. Lee Wilson had already made a fortune growing cotton in other parts of Mississippi County. But this was swampland in the southwestern part of the sprawling Delta county, filled with mosquitoes and snakes. It’s why the federal government’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration could buy the land at a low cost.

A Mississippi County politician and plantation owner named W.R. Dyess had suggested to Harry Hopkins, a special adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt, that the federal government buy 16,000 acres and make the land available to debt-ridden families who needed a second chance. The nation was in the throes of the Great Depression, and an already poor state had become even more poor.

There were plenty of candidates for resettlement, such as the

Cash family of Kingsland. Ray and

Carrie would end up having six kids, including J.R. (later to be known to the world as Johnny), who was born in February 1932 at Kingsland.

Dyess was born in July 1894 in Mississippi and moved across the river to Arkansas in 1926 to become the superintendent of a construction company that was building levees in the Delta. He began farming with his father, who also had moved to Arkansas. They bought farms in Mississippi County, where the hardwood timber was being cleared and land was being drained for cotton cultivation.

“Dyess entered politics, securing an appointment as a member of the Mississippi County Election Commission,” William Pruden III writes for the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “In 1933, Dyess was appointed as the state’s FERA administrator. When that program was superseded in 1935 by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, he oversaw the development of the cooperative farming community that would later bear his name. While what became known as the Dyess Colony Resettlement Area was technically a project of FERA, given that the agency was the source of its funding, the colony didn’t fit into the usual framework of the agency’s other rural rehabilitation projects. Rather, it was more a reflection of Dyess’ vision.

“As a farmer himself, Dyess brought experience and perspective to his implementation of the economic program that most New Deal agency administrators didn’t have. Dyess’ original plan called for 800 destitute farm families—tenant farmers and sharecroppers—to be placed on 20- to 40-acre bottomland plots, each including a house.”

The resettlement colony was known as Colonization Project No. 1. Relief rolls were long in Arkansas in those days, so it wasn’t hard to find 1,300 men to come to these swamps in May 1934 and begin building a colony.

“The colony was laid out in a wagon-wheel design, with a community center at the hub and farms stretching out from the middle,” writes Arkansas historian Nancy Hendricks. “The roads leading out were simply numbered rather than named, as in Road 14. The men dug ditches to drain the land, and they built 500 small farmhouses. Each house had five rooms with an adjacent barn, privy and chicken coop. The houses were whitewashed clapboard, each having two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a dining room, plus a front and back porch. Apart from these improvements to the land, the colonists were expected to do the rest themselves. Like most New Deal housing projects, it was intended for white people only.

“Interviewers from the government were sent to each county in Arkansas to evaluate volunteers, who had to fill out a six-page application form. Families with a farming background from the state’s relief rolls were selected through the application process, which attracted thousands of hopefuls. … Each farmer would draw a subsistence advance to buy 20 or 40 acres of land and one of the new five-room houses, plus a mule, a cow, groceries and supplies until the first year’s crop came in. All were expected to pay back the advance. The town would operate as a cooperative in which seed was purchased and crops were sold communally. The families would then receive a share of any profits from the crops and other Dyess businesses, such as the general store and cannery.”

The local scrip used at the stores was called “doodlum.”

The first families arrived in the fall of 1934. They had to clear trees and pull out stumps. It wasn’t easy work. Still, the resettlement project was enough of a success that it was rumored W.R. Dyess might run for governor or the U.S. Senate. Possible opponents contended that Dyess’ friends had sold the government land that was unsuitable for farming. An investigative team was sent from Washington to look into the allegations. Dyess came out of the investigation unscathed.

On Jan. 14, 1936, Dyess was killed in a plane crash near Goodwin in St. Francis County. In May of that year, Colonization Project No. 1 was named in his honor. In June 1936, the colony received national media attention when Eleanor Roosevelt paid a visit. She spoke at the administration building, had a meal at Dyess Cafe, and shook hands for hours.

By 1940, the number of political disputes between the state and federal governments had grown, and the colony was placed under the supervision of the federal Farm Security Administration.

“Farmers felt they had become subservient to larger entities, much like the former plantation system, undermining their independence,” Hendricks writes. “With the coming of World War II, about half the residents left Dyess for war work, never to return. In 1964, Dyess was incorporated as a municipality and today is governed by a mayor and board.”

J.R. Cash, who first sang on the radio at a Blytheville station while attending Dyess High School, graduated in 1950 and enlisted in the U.S. Air Force after an unsuccessful search for work in Michigan. He bought his first guitar for $5 while stationed in Germany. You know the rest of that story. But what about Dyess?

The town’s population fell from a high of about 2,500 residents in 1936 to 370 today. Based on a favorable 2010 feasibility study, Arkansas State University partnered with the city and restored the administration building, designed by Little Rock architect Howard Eichenbaum. In 2011, ASU purchased the house where the Cash family had lived. The foundation was stabilized and the house was restored based on the original floor plan. Johnny Cash’s two living siblings, Joanne and Tommy, assisted ASU’s Ruth Hawkins in getting it right.

The first Johnny Cash Heritage Festival to be held at Dyess was in October 2017. ASU had earlier held a series of music festivals at Jonesboro to raise money for Dyess projects. The Cash home opened to the public in August 2014. In addition to renovating the administration building, ASU built a visitors’ center on the spot where the Dyess movie theater had stood.

I spend several hours in the visitors’ center and administration building on this Saturday, reading everything even though I’ve been here before. Unlike most who visit Dyess, my primary interest isn’t Johnny Cash. It’s the men and women who came here from across a state that had been ravaged by the Great Depression, people no doubt scared about their future but desperate enough to try something new. I don’t go to the Cash house; I’ve been before.

Instead, I walk along a fallow field and think about those men and women. There are ghosts here; ghosts of Arkansans who put their faith in the Roosevelt administration to make them whole.