Holly Grove holiday

“Some places look made-up, look imagined,” Southern storyteller Rick Bragg once wrote in an essay about the Delta. “The art deco landscape of South Beach looks like it was dreamed up by the writers of a comic book; the skyline of Atlanta seems stenciled by bankers. Las Vegas was set ablaze by electricians; Richmond is ridden by dead soldiers on marble horses. This place is not like that.

“The Delta, while I am sure there are dreams here that have yet to die hard, was made, constructed, not imagined. It was hacked out of a vast, dark, primeval forest, and transformed by pain and blood and muscle, in an age of human bondage. Men felled the trees and burned the stumps, and turned this wide, flat space into a landscape of forever fields, of cotton rows that stretched farther than a strong man could pick in a day. It is not, despite appearances, the end of nowhere. The empty fields are its destination. The weeds let you know where one crop ends and another begins. While other man-made places were covered in people and concrete, here it was the dirt that mattered, and there was just so much of it, between porch lights, and schools, and hospitals. There still is.”

It was to have been a busy spring, My calendar was full with events across the state, the kind that would give me a chance to visit with old friends, make new friends and find material to help this column come alive. The pandemic changed all of that.

One of the cancellations that made me the saddest came April 25. I would have gone to Holly Grove that day to celebrate the 150th anniversary of R. Abramson Co. with my friends Raymond and Mockie Abramson at the Sammy Feldman American Legion Hall. For someone like me who loves Arkansas history and the rich culture of the Delta, that’s about as close to heaven on a spring day as one can get.

The two founders of the company were brothers born in Poland when it was controlled by Prussia. Like many Jews in eastern Europe, they decided to sail for America in search of a better life. Cotton cultivation was beginning to transform the Delta economy in the years after the Civil War.

“Lebanese, Jewish and Chinese merchants arrived,” British travel writer Richard Grant wrote in Dispatches from Pluto, his book about the Delta. “Italian peasants were imported as farm labor but didn’t take to it. Black sharecroppers did most of the work and lived in dire poverty as the white planters established a flamboyant quasi-aristocracy that was heavily dependent on credit at the bank. The ravages of malaria continued into the 1940s, and during bad outbreaks, a Delta planter might propose marriage to his belle by saying, ‘Miss Lucky, may I have the honor of buying your coffin?’” Raymond Abramson told an interviewer in 2017: “There were lots of steamboats traversing the White River in the latter half of the 19th century. In those days, my ancestors were peddlers who traveled on those boats, stopping along the different river communities to sell their goods.” The brothers felt they had found the perfect spot, a community along the lower White River in Monroe County known as Lawrenceville. They opened a store there, but the river changed course following a flood. Lawrenceville wound up being a spot on an oxbow lake rather than a steamboat landing. Lawrenceville was the county seat of Monroe County until 1857, when it was moved to Clarendon.

The brothers moved farther inland to a place along the new railroad line that connected Helena and Clarendon. They settled in the grove of holly trees that became Holly Grove when it was incorporated in 1876. By 1890, there were seven general stores, the Arkansas Central Railroad depot, a restaurant, drugstore, livery stable, cotton gin, gristmill, Masonic lodge, several churches, two doctors and a funeral home.

Raymond’s grandfather established a bank at Holly Grove in 1922. Raymond, now a judge on the Arkansas Court of Appeals, still farms the land his grandfather owned. Raymond went to a boarding school in Georgia, the University of Virginia, and then headed to the University of Edinburgh to take summer courses in art history and architecture. It was in Scotland that Raymond met Mockie, a Virginian and daughter of a Methodist minister.

One of Raymond’s classmates in Atlanta was Chip Carter, the son of a peanut farmer named Jimmy. While attending law school in Fayetteville, Raymond also became friends with a young law professor named Bill Clinton. It says a lot about the draw of the Delta that Raymond came back to Holly Grove to practice law after convincing a highly educated world traveler like Mockie to move there with him.

I’ve had wonderful meals and spent the night in the 1921 house that Raymond’s grandparents built. Estes Mann, a well-known Memphis architect and Marianna native, was hired to design the home in the Craftsman style. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in September 1995. In the nearby commercial district, four buildings belonged to R. Abramson Co.

Hopefully the virus will subside enough later this year so we can celebrate this family legacy in a region that Bragg described this way: “There is a sadness here that some people can hardly bear, but it is also a place where people live, where you can get the best tamale in the whole wide world, where clean white sheets snap like pistol shots on the clothesline, propane tanks shine on the horizon like spaceships, and a man with mud on his boots is not sneered at but admired because mud means money, squeezed from the catfish ponds and farms.”