America’s AMAZON
Interest in Woodruff County is rising with the recent addition of goose hunting to its established attractions of fishing, boating, birding and other outdoor recreation opportunities.
The phone rang early one morning back in 2018. On the line was the man who at the time was chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party, Michael John Gray of Augusta.
Even though it was an election year, the subject wasn’t politics. Gray wanted to discuss far more important things such as eating at quality restaurants and traveling this unique place called Arkansas.
Those of us who follow Arkansas politics were surprised in spring 2017 when Gray was selected to succeed Vince Insalaco as Democratic Party chairman. With rural Arkansas increasingly voting Republican since 2010, conventional wisdom was that Democrats would find their chairman in a liberal enclave such as Little Rock or Fayetteville.
The party instead chose the kind of rural Southern Democrat who was commonplace in the 20th century. Gray is a farmer with a law degree, a founding member of the Arkansas Peanut Growers Association, and a member of the Woodruff County Farm Bureau and First United Methodist Church of Augusta.
He had read my essay on the cover of this newspaper’s Sunday Perspective section, which was about taking U.S. 70 rather than truck-heavy Interstate 40 between Little Rock and Memphis.
“You should have mentioned taking U.S. 64 from Bald Knob over to Marion,” he said that morning. “It’s only about 10 miles farther than taking the interstate when you come up U.S. 67 from North Little Rock and get off at Bald Knob. And it’s much more peaceful.”
I admitted that even though the U.S. 70 story made for interesting research, the Bald Knob-to-Marion route is indeed my preferred way to get to Memphis these days. Gray invited me to join him one Friday or Saturday night at the Tamale Factory in Gregory, several
miles south of Augusta on Arkansas 33.
The Tamale Factory was opened in November 2012 by George Eldridge, the founder of Doe’s Eat Place in downtown Little Rock.
Eldridge, who grew up in Woodruff County, converted part of a horse barn into a restaurant. He used the barn for his quarter horse operation. The Eldridge family home is on one side, and the family cemetery is on the other.
People drive from as far away as Little Rock and Memphis to eat tamales, shrimp and steaks on Friday and Saturday nights in this rural setting. If you look closely on the wall back by the men’s room, you’ll see a framed copy of a column I wrote about the Tamale Factory.
Dinners at the Tamale Factory resemble a big east Arkansas family reunion. Eldridge walks from table to table, visiting with the regulars. His colorful stories are as much of an attraction as the food. This is a man who can honestly describe some of the nation’s most famous politicians and musicians as personal friends.
During duck season, the restaurant’s website describes the scene this way: “Wear your favorite faded jeans or your hunting camouflage. Dress up a bit if the mood suits you. Anything pretty much goes along with the ambiance here.”
In the more than five years since that phone call from Gray, things have changed. Gray left the Legislature and is no longer party chairman. He’s back home full time, serving as Woodruff County judge. Eldridge, meanwhile, decided he was tired of running the restaurant and decided to close it. Gray visited with him, told him how important it was to the county, and begged him to keep it open.
“If you want it open, then you can run it,” Eldridge said.
Gray agreed. So it is that I find myself sharing a table with Gray and Eldridge late on a Friday afternoon, talking about Woodruff County’s future and past. Having served for four years as a presidential appointee to the Delta Regional Authority, I’ve long been fascinated by historic Delta counties like this one. Figuring out how they survive in the knowledge-based economy of the 21st century isn’t an easy task.
I met Gray earlier in the day at the Woodruff County Courthouse in Augusta, which is in a residential area just a few blocks from the White River. The courthouse was built at a time when Woodruff County was thriving economically in a state where cotton dominated the economy.
In 1901, county officials appointed T.H. Connor as building commissioner to oversee the construction of courthouses at Augusta and Cotton Plant. The county appropriated $44,000, including $30,000 for the Augusta building.
The state’s most well-known architect at the time, Charles L. Thompson, was hired to design the buildings. The Cotton Plant structure no longer stands.
According to the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program: “Thompson planned the Augusta courthouse in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, an eclectic design named after the work of architect Henry Hobson Richardson. Connor awarded the contract to build the structure to C.W. Clark of Little Rock. On the exterior, its most distinctive feature is a clock tower that crowns the pressed-brick building, along with the pyramidal and high-hipped roofing.
“Inside, a multicolored tiled mural covers the main level, and pine wainscoting adorns the second-floor courtroom. The building opened in December 1902 with much fanfare. … Judge E.D. Robinson started the first court session with 68 cases on the docket, including 38 filings for divorce.”
The Arkansas Democrat reported at the time of the building’s opening: “To say it is a beauty is putting it very mildly.”
Woodruff County had a population of 16,304 in the 1900 census. Many of its residents were sharecroppers and tenant farmers who tilled the rich soil in a county that includes the White River, Cache River and Bayou DeView. By 1940, the population had reached 22,133 residents as more of the bottomland hardwoods were cleared for farming. Merchants were thriving in towns such as Augusta, McCrory and Cotton Plant.
Bluesman Peetie Wheatstraw and gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe hailed from Cotton Plant. Augusta later produced professional football star Billy Ray Smith. Legendary high school football coaches such as Curtis King at Augusta and Joe Hart at McCrory once called Woodruff County home.
By the late 1940s, sharecroppers and tenant farmers were losing their jobs due to agricultural mechanization. They fled Woodruff County by the thousands for steel mills and automobile assembly plants in cities such as Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago. By the 1960 census, the county’s population was down to 13,954. By the 2020 census, it was 6,269, fewer than the 6,891 people who called Woodruff County home in 1870.
My mother hailed from Des Arc in Prairie County, a bit south down the White River from Augusta. I spent parts of each summer as a boy at my grandparents’ house on Erwin Street in Des Arc and have long had a soft spot for the culture of the lower White River region. I worry about its future.
I think back to a conversation I had in 2017 with a former Augusta resident named Boyd Wright. As I sat in the downtown offices of the Eldridge & Eldridge law firm, he told me: “Augusta has been looking for an answer for years on how we stop the erosion. The reality of farming has changed. You don’t need the same number of people you used to back in the day. This was a farming community. We’ve had three factories that have been empty in our county for 15 years or more.
“Within a 10-mile radius of this office are more than 100,000 acres, 36 lakes and five streams suitable for duck hunting. … Duck hunting has become wildly popular. We hold some of the largest concentrations of ducks in North America in this county each winter. People from Little Rock, Memphis and even farther away are paying a lot of money to lease land and build clubs.”
Duck numbers declined since that 2017 visit, but geese that once wintered along the Gulf Coast south of Houston are now coming to Arkansas by the millions. Hunters can visit the Arkansas Delta and hunt ducks and geese on the same trip.
Gray was born at Blytheville; his family moved to his mother’s hometown of Augusta when he was a baby. He served in the House from 2015-19. He was elected county judge in November 2022, running as an independent.
Gray agrees with what Wright said about the county capitalizing on those who visit Woodruff County to sample its outdoor recreational opportunities. But he sees it as much more than hunting. He wants to attract birdwatchers, canoeists, kayakers, hikers and cyclists.
“I view the Cache River and lower White River as America’s Amazon,” he says. “Some of the oldest and biggest cypress trees in the world are in this county. When people learn about what’s here, they want to come back. There used to be people living in houseboats all up and down the White River. They were commercial fishermen and gathered mussel shells for the button factories. Now we see people building clubhouses and second homes along the river. That Eldridge law office you sat in is now used for corporate retreats.
“We have the second-smallest population of any county in the state when it comes to full-time residents, but there are hunting clubs popping up everywhere. That trend is going to accelerate as goose hunting catches on.”
Prior to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers building Greers Ferry Lake on the Little Red River, Memphis area residents flocked to places like Camp Howdy on Taylor Bay.
I find an old postcard that reads: “On beautiful Taylor Bay near its confluence with the White River, Camp Howdy offers unsurpassed bass, bream and crappie fishing. There’s glass-smooth water for safe boating and skiing. There are boats, motors and housekeeping cottages for rent at reasonable prices.”
“This bay is where I learned to ski,” Gray says. “We now have people building second homes on the bay. Look how accessible this is. A person can leave downtown Little Rock or downtown Memphis and be here in less than 90 minutes.”
Gray wants to work with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission to improve the quality of fishing in Taylor Bay and the dozens of oxbow lakes that dot Woodruff County.
Hardwood trees are being restored in parts of the county, especially since the establishment in 1986 of the 73,000-acre Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. Covering parts of Woodruff, Prairie, Monroe and Jackson counties, it’s considered to be among the most important wintering areas for ducks. It preserves the largest remaining tract of contiguous bottomland hardwood forest in North America.
“With high prices for rice prevailing during World War I and World War II, farmers in the county cleared many acres for rice production,” Paula Harmon Barnett and David Sesser write for the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “Drainage districts were organized and channels were cut through lowlands. From 1950-55, Woodruff County had about 3,000 acres cleared for rice. By 2004, it had 62,400 acres in rice and ranked 10th in production among the state’s 75 counties.
“Soybeans, however, remained Woodruff County’s main crop. In 1880, the amount of improved land in Woodruff County was 40,671 acres. By 2004, there were 284,731 acres of farmland with 255,216 of that in crops.”
In addition to the federal government planting hardwoods where there once were row crops, private hunting clubs are now doing the same.
Back at the Tamale Factory in Gregory, the restaurant is filled to capacity by 6 p.m. This farm has been in the Eldridge family since the 1800s. George Eldridge began using the barn to produce tamales for Doe’s and other restaurants such as Blues City Cafe in Memphis. When the Little Rock Doe’s opened in 1988, he brought tamales from the original location in Greenville, Miss. He later used a producer at Newport.
“We sell around 3,000 a week at Doe’s and 1,000 here at the new place,” Eldridge told an interviewer in 2013. “It took a year to build out here, and we did it all ourselves. When we first opened the restaurant, it was the beginning of duck season, and things took off right from the start.”
The state’s 60-day duck season remains the busiest period. If Gray is successful in attracting floaters, birdwatchers, hikers and cyclists, the busy period just might stretch to 12 months a year.