I leave Dyess, the former federal resettlement colony in southern Mississippi County, and head east on Arkansas 14 to Wilson. Once a company town, Wilson has now become the jewel of the Arkansas Delta.
Robert E. Lee Wilson inherited 400 acres in Mississippi County following his father's death in 1870. He expanded that initial inheritance into a 50,000-acre lumber and cotton operation, buying swampland for as little as 50 cents an acre, draining it, selling the harvested cypress and other bottomland hardwoods, and then turning it into cotton fields.
In the 1980s, a young historian named Jeannie Whayne considered doing her doctoral dissertation on the Wilson plantation. She says, "an encounter with a snake in the basement of the Mississippi County jail convinced me to look elsewhere for a dissertation topic. No company records existed, or so it seemed at the time, and a county official indicated that county records were unavailable to me.
"Oscar Fendler, an attorney representing the Wilson family, gained me entry to the basement of the county jail so that I could examine the records discarded there. Thus began an adventure that Fendler never tired of recalling, though he only heard the story from me.
"The jailer held a flashlight, a guard stood by with a rifle as two prisoners in jail jumpsuits picked up the books and held them in the light for me to examine. Finding nothing of interest, I noticed another stack of books across the room and started to move toward them. Years later it occurred to me that the entire charade--aside from the snake which slithered by at that moment and could not have been choreographed--was intended to discourage me. It worked. I chose another topic."
Before entering that basement, Whayne had visited the company offices in the English Tudor-style town of Wilson and come up empty in her search for records.
Whayne, a longtime history professor at the University of Arkansas, later wrote a book titled Arkansas Delta: A Land of Paradox. She was at a book-signing event at That Bookstore In Blytheville when she was approached by Mike Wilson, the plantation owner. He asked her to write a history of Lee Wilson & Co.
"I had some understandable misgivings," Whayne says. "Any book I wrote, I explained to Mike, would be critical of certain aspects of the company's operation. He insisted he understood that and believed that it was important to cover all aspects of the company's history. He wanted the unvarnished truth, and I came to understand that he meant what he said."
Wilson donated company ledgers to the University of Arkansas archives. The real breakthrough came with the discovery of company correspondence files, which also were donated to the university.
"Mike called me some time in the late 1990s to tell me that when workmen removed a malfunctioning air conditioning unit to replace it, they discovered a false wall and a room full of boxes," Whayne says.
Mike Wilson died suddenly in 2008 while Whayne was working on the book Delta Empire, which was released in 2011 by Louisiana State University Press. His brother Steve, sister Midge and Mike's son Perry continued to work with Whayne on the manuscript. Meanwhile, Eldon Fairley of the Mississippi County Historical Society rescued those county records from the basement of the jail.
In October 2010, while Whayne was finishing work on the book, it was announced that the Wilson family was selling the company. In December of that year, it was revealed that Gaylon Lawrence Sr. of Sikeston, Mo., and Gaylon Lawrence Jr. of Nashville, Tenn., had paid an estimated $150 million for Lee Wilson & Co.
At the time, the father and son owned banks in Arkansas, Missouri and Tennessee. Their Lawrence Group also owned more than 165,000 acres in Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Florida, Illinois and other states. They grew everything from cotton to soybeans to citrus fruits on that land. The Lawrence Group had also purchased U.S. Air Conditioning Distributors, which had almost $600 million in annual sales and operations.
Gaylon Lawrence Sr. grew up working alongside his sister, mother and father on the family farm north of Pollard in Clay County. He later purchased and worked on farms in southeast Missouri. Gaylon Lawrence Jr. worked on those farms as a boy. The younger Lawrence later told the Nashville Business Journal that he's "an accumulator" who prefers investing in "good, solid assets that I can own for a lifetime."
He wanted the thousands of acres of rich farmland owned by Lee Wilson & Co. He wasn't sure what to do with the town. Lawrence Jr. at first considered keeping the farmland that came with the purchase while divesting himself of the commercial property at Wilson. But he became fascinated with the history of the town and decided instead to pour millions of dollars into Wilson.
I've come here on this day to eat a late lunch at Wilson Cafe, shop at White's Mercantile, and visit the Hampson Museum. Wilson has become so country chic that it's featured in the April-May edition of the Southern lifestyle magazine Garden & Gun.
Nic Brown writes in the magazine: "There was a time when the tiny Delta town of Wilson was booming so hard that it was ginning more cotton than almost anywhere else in the South, all of its storefronts were being built to resemble an English Tudor village, and the hundreds of employees working its fertile soil were paid in currency printed by Lee Wilson & Co., which created the town itself in 1886. Then the Depression hit, the cotton industry crumbled, and by the turn of the new millennium, the town had become a shell of its earlier self.
"Just about all that was left open for business was the pharmacy, a bank, and the post office. Like many a Delta community, Wilson had almost faded away before the arrival of Gaylon Lawrence Jr., chairman of the Lawrence Group, whose nationwide holdings include stakes in vineyards and citrus groves. ... And while he acquired the land for its farming potential, Lawrence developed an unlikely plan for Wilson itself: to remake the decaying Delta town, then population 912, into a center of art, culture and education."
Lawrence hired Joe Cartwright and Shari' Haley from well-known restaurants in Memphis to create the kind of place to which people will drive an hour or two to eat.
"Anchoring the square in an immaculately restored Tudor-style building, the cafe serves upscale diner fare, much of it sourced from nearby Whitton Farms," Brown writes. "Holly Williams, Hank Williams' granddaughter, joined them in 2017, opening an outpost of her modern general store, White's Mercantile, in a former gas station and stocking the shelves with Southern-made goods-- scrimshaw knives from Mollyjogger and Moonshine cologne from EastWest Bottlers. Last year, the outdoor clothing brand Tom Beckbe launched its flagship around the corner."
Radcliff Menge, the Tom Beckbe founder, told the magazine: "There are places that cast a shadow much bigger than their geographical footprint, and Wilson has become one of those places. To our customers, the Delta is the center of the sporting world. The Delta's got a great reputation for grit. Now Wilson is its polished-up diamond."
A new location for the Hampson Museum, displaying the Native American artifacts collected by Dr. James Kelly Hampson from 1932 until his death in 1956, opened on the square in 2018. A boutique hotel is being constructed, a welcome center opened last year across from the square in a renovated brick building next to White's Mercantile, a former school gymnasium is being turned into a fitness facility called Wilson Athletic Village, and the renowned Wildrose Kennels has helped develop the Bar W Shooting Preserve on a nearby island known as Pecan Point.
With Gaylon Lawrence Jr. at the helm, there's no end in sight to the development of this Delta oasis.
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Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 04/05/2020