The road to Dalark
Growing up in Arkadelphia, I came to realize that I was on the edge of two worlds. I could head west into the Ouachita Mountains. There were hills, lots of rocks, clear mountain streams, no row-crop agriculture and a population that was almost entirely white. I could cross the Ouachita River and head east into the Old South—small cotton fields, lots of Black residents, slow-moving streams and sloughs.
To the trained ear, even the accents were different if you listened to someone who grew up in the hills at Amity and then someone who grew up in the Gulf Coastal Plain at Dalark on the Clark County-Dallas County line.
My father and I were quail hunters, and we would travel east into that land of cotton, soybeans, pine trees and even water tupelos growing in coffee-colored swamps. There were still a number of small Black-owned farms in the early 1970s, and my father knew most of the owners of the farms between Arkadelphia and Manning. Dad owned a sporting goods store and would give the owners shotgun shells in return for permission to bird hunt on their land.
My favorite landowner was a one-armed man named Arthur Bullock, who lived in an unpainted wooden house with a hog pen connected to the rear. Bullock, who was Black, liked to hunt rabbits and squirrels on his land near the Manchester community. He traded them for the quail we killed. He also would flag us down after killing the first hog each winter so he could give us sausage.
A white plantation owner named Charles Bullock brought almost 50 slaves with him to Arkansas in the 1840s as land in this area was being cleared for cotton cultivation. A book called “A Remembrance of Eden” contains Harriet Bailey Bullock Daniel’s memories of plantation life from 1849 until her marriage in 1872. These are, of course, the memories of an elderly white woman. I can assure you it wasn’t Eden for the slaves.
As was often the case, slaves on the Bullock Plantation took the last name of the owner. I have little doubt that Arthur Bullock’s parents or grandparents were slaves there.
What I experienced in this rural area of south Arkansas in the early 1970s was closer to life in the late 1800s than what we see now. The cotton and soybean fields are gone, replaced by pine plantations. The rural population has hollowed out. Those who remain are more likely to live in mobile homes than the old wooden houses that once dotted the countryside. The country stores are gone.
Dad and I would alternate between the two stores at Dalark when it came time for lunch on those quail-hunting Saturdays. Both of the wooden buildings looked like something out of a Depression-era photo. Though the segregation era thankfully had ended, the store at the intersection of Arkansas 7 and Arkansas 8 was thought of as the “white store.”
Less than a mile away was the “Black store,” operated by John “Sugar” Jones. He always wore overalls with patches on them and enjoyed joking with my father. The store later was operated by his son, Danny, who was born at Dalark in 1947 and died in 2018. A hungry hunter could get a good bologna sandwich for lunch at either store.
Though the area has changed, I still enjoy traversing the rural roads. On this day, I’m with Larry Pennington, who grew up along Palmetto Road near Dalark, named for an area that’s covered with dwarf palmetto. The bushes are so thick that you feel more like you’re in Florida or Louisiana than Arkansas.
Pennington wants me to see Old Dunn Cemetery, which is hidden in the Dallas County woods behind Roy Johnson’s house on Palmetto Road. Several tombstones have fallen, but one that’s still standing is that of former Confederate Maj. Lafayette Ross, who was born in Kentucky in 1826 and died in Arkansas in 1880. Nearby is the gravestone of an infant who died in 1878. He was the son of Dr. R.G. Land. The infant’s parents also are buried here.
The last burial I can find was in 1899, after which this cemetery on a hardwood-covered ridge above a creek appears to have been abandoned.
With a population of 6,482 in the 2020 census, Dallas County is the state’s fourth-smallest county. Only Lafayette, Woodruff and Calhoun counties have smaller populations. A post office opened at Dalark in October 1887.
According to Goodspeed’s 1891 county history: “Dalark, on the Dallas and Clark County lines and so named, is the child of the Ultima Thule, Arkadelphia & Mississippi Railway, which was begun in 1886 with a view to passing through Princeton and Fordyce, but has extended only five miles into the county from the west. It has sprung up about the Arkadelphia Lumber Co.’s plant and is really a mill town with several stores.”
In October 2014, documentary photographer Nina Robinson traveled to Dalark and began to document her grandmother’s death and her family’s grieving process. She became fascinated with the Black community in Dalark. The visit turned into a twoyear project titled “Not Forgotten: An Arkansas Family Album.” Robinson was raised in California.
Robinson’s family goes back six generations here. She documents celebrations and reunions at churches that have served as anchors for the Black community. Her photos were later displayed at locations such as the Bronx Documentary Center. Robinson’s clients include Netflix, The New York Times, Harper’s, Time and The Wall Street Journal.
“Taking them, I wasn’t even thinking,” she said of the Dalark photos. “I was just feeling. I wasn’t thinking about different shots. I was in this mode of ‘my camera is my shield,’ and I’m just snapping that photo.”