Winter at Wingmead

My mother was a daughter of the Grand Prairie, born in Des Arc in 1925, two years before the Great Flood inundated east Arkansas.

Rice was becoming an important crop in the region by then. Bill Hope had planted a plat as an experiment near Stuttgart in 1902. The results were good enough that other farmers followed his lead. Stuttgart Rice Mill Co. was incorporated in March 1907 and completed in October of that year, just in time for the harvest. It made a profit of $16,000.

In 1921, the farmers’ cooperative that’s now Riceland Foods Inc. was formed. By 1926, the University of Arkansas had located its Rice Research and Extension Center at Stuttgart. With rice came ducks — millions of them. The World’s Championship Duck Calling Contest, now part of Stuttgart’s Wings Over the Prairie Festival, began in 1936.

By the early 1930s, Edgar Monsanto Queeny of St. Louis, one of the country’s richest men, was coming to Arkansas to hunt ducks. Queeny, born in September 1897, was the son of John Francis Queeny. His father founded Monsanto Chemical Co. when Queeny was 4. By 1928, Queeny had become the company’s president.

Queeny founded what became the country’s most prestigious duck-hunting retreat, Wingmead. Plans for the main house at Wingmead, in southern Prairie County, were drawn in 1937. Construction ended in 1939.

When Wingmead was nominated for inclusion on the National Register of Historic

Places, the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program’s narrative stated: “Although his father was concerned that Queeny was going to ruin Monsanto because ‘he wants to change everything,’ the opposite was the case. By the time Queeny retired from Monsanto in 1960, it had become the third-largest chemical company in the United States and the fifth largest in the world.

“After Queeny retired from Monsanto, he spent much of his time involved in civic projects in the St. Louis area. Queeny served as a director for the United Fund of St. Louis, chairman of the board of Barnes Hospital, where he and his wife also donated funds for the construction of Queeny Tower, and as a member of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.”

From October until March each year, however, Queeny was in Arkansas.

My grandfather in Des Arc, who died during the hot summer of 1980 at age 96, had been Prairie County judge in the 1930s. Having served in several county offices — and having owned a funeral home and hardware store — he knew virtually everyone in the county at one time. He sometimes told stories of formal dinners at Wingmead.

More than 80 years after he attended those dinners, I’m having dinner in the dining room of Wingmead with Ashley and Wil Jackson. It’s my first time to be here.

Queeny died in July 1968. His wife maintained the property until her death in 1975, when it was donated to Barnes Hospital. Barnes auctioned Wingmead in 1976, and the Lyon family of Little Rock had the highest bid. Ashley is the daughter of Jane Lyon.

Queeny began hunting near DeWitt with Elmer “Tippy” LaCotts and Jess Wilson, who was considered the best hunting guide in the South.

In his 1946 book “Prairie Wings,” Queeny wrote: “I met Jess for the first time about 10 years ago when he was guiding near DeWitt on Elmer LaCotts’ Mill Bayou flats. The moment he stepped out of his tent to greet me, and before he had spoken a word, I knew I would like him, for there are silent voices between men also. A man’s face is a chart of his soul. One look at Jess’ face and I decided instantly that we would get along well together. I have shot with him ever since.”

Queeny was obsessed with waterfowl. When LaCotts wouldn’t sell property, Queeny turned to the area that became Wingmead. The farm now covers almost 15,000 acres. Despite the millions of dollars he invested in the property, Queeny wasn’t popular with the area’s full-time residents.

Brent Birch is the author of “The Grand Prairie: A History of Duck Hunting’s Hallowed Ground.”

“Like a lot of rich and powerful men, Queeny was used to getting what he wanted by going over, around or through impediments,” Birch writes. “Wingmead was no different. Forming Arkansas Irrigation Co., he won favor for the proposal of Peckerwood Lake. Gaining his irrigation company the power of eminent domain, he wielded that authority to force farmers near the hamlet of Slovak to sell their land.

“Queeny’s personality and high intellect deprived him of a common touch, and his reclusive habits did nothing to smooth over lingering hard feelings about the deal. That maneuver notwithstanding, Queeny’s work at Wingmead advanced duck management practices substantially. Verne Tindall’s irrigation reservoir caught his attention, and in addition to the standing dead timber in Peckerwood Lake, he also constructed three greentree reservoirs on his property, possibly the first ever constructed.

“Hunting was allowed on these three reservoirs, but Peckerwood Lake was reserved as a rest area for ducks. These practices are commonplace on the Grand Prairie today. Queeny’s lair continued to capture the public’s imagination after his death from heart failure.”

Queeny spared no expense. The National Register nomination notes: “When Queeny was having Wingmead designed, he incorporated knowledge of duck flight into the design. In fact, Queeny hired aeronautical engineers and biologists to study duck flyways. Their findings helped him employ sound conservation methods at Wingmead, methods that were later used along the entire flyway.”

The 4,000-acre waterfowl haven known as Peckerwood Lake was created in 1942.

“Although Queeny used Peckerwood Lake for irrigation of Wingmead’s farmland, it also provided a rest area,” the nomination narrative states. “Also, because of the location of Peckerwood Lake in the Mississippi Flyway, there were plenty of ducks to hunt.”

Queeny wrote: “Whoever is unfamiliar with this region may consider words picturing prolonged swarms of ducks to be extravagant language. However, Fish & Wildlife Service officials counted 135,000 ducks on one flat of 300 acres; 500,000 on another 640 acres; and more than a million on a third of 1,600 acres.”

The 10,000-square-foot main house had nine bedrooms, nine bathrooms and a separate dining room. There were separate buildings for an office, manager’s house, stable, kennel, garage, writing cabin and storage facilities. Birch writes of the “retinue of business titans who were expected to dress formally” for dinner each evening.

“Such affectations might have seemed a bit eccentric to the permanent citizenry of the Grand Prairie, but underneath the glamorous exterior beat the heart of a naturalist who had the means to indulge his adventures,” Birch writes. “During his life, Queeny would go on an African safari for the American Museum of Natural History where he documented native wildlife.

“His collaboration with famed wildlife artist Richard Bishop on the seminal work ‘Prairie Wings’ is considered the preeminent book on waterfowl flight. He later bankrolled the book’s adaptation into a nature film by the same name. Shot on the Grand Prairie in full color and slow motion, it was used as an effective recruitment tool for Ducks Unlimited chapters from one end of the country to the other.”

The main house is still filled with Bishop’s art. Bishop was the only person Queeny let vary from the guest schedule. He could stay at Wingmead as long as he wished. Bishop, like Queeny, was a Cornell University graduate. Bishop graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1909 and began drawing in 1920 while working at a Philadelphia manufacturing plant.

By 1933, Bishop had become a full-time artist. His sketch of Canada geese appeared on the 1936 federal duck stamp. Wingmead has one of the nation’s few complete collections of federal duck stamp prints.

In the words of outdoor writer Nash Buckingham: “Thanks to the painstaking Bishop curiosity and his searching slow-motion cameras, we have the waterfowl and their ways not as we suppose them to be, but as God made them.”