Cotton and steel
Economic development officials in Mississippi County use the slogan “Cotton to Steel” when talking about the transformation of this northeast Arkansas county from the leading cotton-producing area in the country to the leading steel-producing region.
I’m on U.S. 61, the famous Blues Highway, between Wilson and Osceola. Mississippi County Judge John Alan Nelson is driving as we discuss the slogan. Cranes can be seen in the distance as thousands of construction workers build a $3 billion facility for U.S. Steel. The fields surrounding the construction site are filled with cotton, the bolls white as the harvest nears.
Nelson spent decades as a farmer. He notes that agriculture, the largest sector of the Arkansas economy, still helps drive the Mississippi County economy. Tens of thousands of acres are devoted to raising row crops such as cotton, soybeans, corn and rice. We agree that the slogan should be “Cotton and Steel” rather than “Cotton to Steel” since cotton and other crops don’t appear to be going anywhere.
If anything, agriculture will become even more important to this area of the state in the decades ahead as the world’s population grows (more mouths to feed and bodies to clothe) and as southwestern and western parts of the country run out of water.
Nelson hands me a printout of an Associated Press story that begins: “Community leaders along the Mississippi River worried that dry southwestern states will someday try to take the river’s water may take their first step toward blocking such a diversion. … The Southwest has long struggled to find enough water for its growing population in a region prone to drought that climate change is making worse.
“Transporting water from the Mississippi River basin, which drains roughly 40 percent of the continental United States, has always been a long shot that many say isn’t practical or remotely cost-effective. Proponents of a compact among the river’s 10 states say a compact would protect the river’s water levels and ecology, making it easier to coordinate when floods or other disasters strike.”
Olivia Dorothy, director of river restoration for the conservation group American Rivers, told AP: “If you want the Mississippi River water, you can move here.”
Indeed, the availability of water eventually will be a huge benefit to areas along the river such as Mississippi County. The combination of row-crop agriculture and steel make me bullish on this place.
The next thing Nelson hands me is a book that shows how Mississippi County was transformed from hardwoods to fields of cotton. Too much water was the problem in those days. “It Didn’t Just Happen” tells the story of the major drainage systems that were developed in the early 1900s. The book was commissioned by drainage districts and written by Elliott B. Sartain in 1975.
“When settlers began arriving in eastern Arkansas, they found a gigantic hardwood forest intermingled with streams, lakes, bayous and cypress brakes,” Sartain wrote. “The soil that supported most of this hardwood forest, and also that in the bottom of shallow lakes and cypress brakes, was highly suitable for agriculture. Subduing the wilderness during all but fairly recent years was difficult to accomplish.
“The conversion of forests and cutover land into productive farms was slow work and frequently required the labor of more than one generation prior to the advent of modern drainage and land-clearing equipment. During the past few years, one man with a bulldozer and one or two helpers has been able to clear more land in one summer than a family used to be able to clear in 20 or 30 years.”
In 1910, Carson Lake Drainage District No. 8 was the first of the main districts to organize in Mississippi County. There had earlier been several small areas that set up districts to construct ditches, but the big projects were still to come.
“Construction began in 1912,” Sartain wrote. “The work was done under extreme conditions, such as water being on the land the entire year. There were numerous bayous and lakes to contend with. At that time, the chief engineer would organize a survey party of six or seven men with an instrument man in charge of each unit. They were taken into the area, and most times a camp was established from which they worked.”
The men lived in the camps for up to 30 days at a time. Sartain noted that roads were scarce and travel was almost impossible during bad weather. If someone had to go into town due to an emergency, it usually was done on a railroad handcar. Sartain wrote that the men in the camp worked “under the most trying conditions such as water, wilderness, thickets, streams, snakes, wild animals of all sorts and no facilities whatsoever for living quarters. They were housed in tents.”
When the work began, there were about 25 miles of drainage ditches in the sprawling county. There are now more than 1,000 miles of ditches.
“The report of the federal government for the year 1910 showed that there were 3,530 farms on 153,000 acres of cultivated land, which averaged 43 acres of land per farm,” Sartain wrote. “In 1972, there were 1,194 farms on 491,000 acres of land, an average of 411 acres of land per farm. This clearly reflects the change in farming that has taken place. Now the trend is to even larger farms.”
The average farmer in Mississippi County these days oversees crops on thousands of acres. Nelson views the steel boom as complementing rather than replacing the importance of agriculture in the county. The future is cotton and steel.