We're at the corner of Natchez and Kate Adams streets. It's obvious from the street names that we're in a historic river town.
Natchez is a once-thriving city in Mississippi that overlooks the Mississippi River. And the Kate Adams was the name of three riverboats that were operated by the Memphis & Arkansas River Packet Co. The boats carried cotton and passengers on the Mississippi River. The third and final Kate Adams, which was built in Pittsburgh in 1898, was used in a 1926 silent movie, Uncle Tom's Cabin, most of which was filmed at Natchez.
"Early risers who were astir at daylight this morning were the first to catch the welcome sound of the long whistle of the Kate Adams as she came around Choctaw Bend, and in half an hour the whole town was agog with curiosity and excitement over the arrival of the new boat," the Arkansas City Journal reported on Dec. 23, 1882. "When her whistle announced her approach to the elevator, a rush of people to the wharf and the boom of anvils immediately followed."
On Jan. 8, 1927, the third Kate Adams burned while docked at Memphis, leaving only the steel hull.
The year 1927 was a bad one for Arkansas City in southeast Arkansas. Not only did the boat known by locals as the Lovin' Kate burn, the Great Flood of 1927 caused the Mississippi River to change course. That left the town on an oxbow lake (Kate Adams Lake) rather than on the nation's largest river.
"The 1927 flood devastated the town," Paula Reaves writes for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. "More than 2,000 people had to be rescued. The floodwaters were up to the second floor of some homes, and the citizens of the area camped in tents on top of the levee. When the floodwaters receded, the river channel, which was just across the levee, had moved about a mile to the east. This brought an end to the port at Arkansas City and made the railroads useless. The town never fully recovered from this tragedy. Arkansas City became a quiet little town in the years following the flood."
Just across Front Street from the levee, in the Red Star Grocery building that was constructed in 1900, Rick Hales is hard at work. A German immigrant named John George Reitzammer constructed the building. He had come to the United States in 1870 and lived in the Ohio River cities of Cincinnati and Louisville before settling at Arkansas City in 1882. The building served as a bakery and grocery store until Leonard Reitzammer, John George's youngest son, died in 1979. Robert Moore Jr., the former speaker of the Arkansas House of Representatives and a current member of the powerful Arkansas Highway Commission, saved the structure in his hometown. Tennessee-based developer Gary Gibbs, who built the nearby Delta Resort & Spa, hoped to transform the Red Star into a bed-and-breakfast inn. The project never went forward.
Hales has taken on the project. The former Monticello resident, a network engineer by training, helped Gibbs bring high-speed Internet service to the shooting and hunting resort near McGehee. In addition to a shooting sports complex, Delta Resort & Spa has 132 hotel rooms, meeting facilities, a restaurant and a bar. In 2015, Hales became Delta Resort's general manager. But after buying a home last year adjacent to the levee at Arkansas City, he fell in love with the town and decided to take on the Red Star project himself. He plans to open a bakery in one half of the first floor ("I already have an Amish family lined up to supply the baked goods," he says) and a restaurant in the other half that will feature live blues music on Friday and Saturday nights. The second floor will consist of four rooms for overnight guests. Putting his background as a network engineer to work, Hales will lease a tower from AT&T to ensure Internet access for his visitors.
"I would look out the windows of my home and see people parking a Mercedes or a BMW at the foot of the levee," Hales says. "They had expensive bikes attached to their cars. They were here to ride on the levee. That's when I decided that we needed to offer them a place to eat and spend the night."
Moore hopes to convert his late mother's home to a bed-and-breakfast inn with five rooms, giving Arkansas City (whose population fell from 1,482 in the 1920 census to 366 in the 2010 census) a total of nine overnight rooms. Moore's efforts through the years have led to 17 miles being paved atop the levee near Arkansas City. It's part of a much larger effort that has the potential to turn the Arkansas Delta into a mecca for cyclists.
Last week, the Walton Family Foundation announced a $1.19 million grant to expand trails atop levees from near Marianna to Helena and then west to the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism's Delta Heritage Trail. That's a former railroad right of way that's being developed in phases into an 84.5-mile biking and hiking trail. When completed, the trail will stretch from six miles west of Helena all the way south to Arkansas City. Cyclists eventually will be able to ride from Arkansas City to downtown Memphis, creating an international attraction. The Delta Heritage Trail will cross the White and Arkansas rivers on abandoned railroad bridges.
Parks and Tourism is nearing completion of a trailhead facility in downtown Arkansas City. If Hales can complete his project, visiting cyclists will have a place to eat, drink, listen to music and spend the night. The town will have gone from welcoming steamboats to welcoming well-heeled cyclists.
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Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 03/14/2018