Downtown Wilson
Wilson is a city in Mississippi County, Arkansas. Wilson started as a company town in 1886 surrounded by rich farmland, and was sold by the Wilson family in 2010. The population was 903 at the 2010 census.
History
Wilson started as a company town for Robert E. Lee Wilson's nearby logging and sawmill operation founded in 1886. The village prospered when Wilson decided to use the cleared land for agriculture instead of selling it after logging. In 1900, a major archeological find occurred near Wilson when James K. Hampson discovered the Island 35 Mastodon. All residents of Wilson except the postmaster and railroad employees were employees who had access to company doctors for $1.25 annually ($17.47 in 2013 dollars), a rarity in the poverty-stricken Arkansas Delta. The company also employed people to work in Wilson's basic service industries, such as drycleaning and automobile repair, keeping the standard of living high.
Geography
According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 2.8 km² (1.1 mi²), all land. The area is dominated by the Mississippi River flood plains, trees and fields. Along and parallel to the Tennessee–Arkansas state line, the former course of the Mississippi River as it was before the New Madrid earthquakes is still visible in the landscape almost 200 years after the events. The former riverbed has shrunk to small side arms of the Mississippi River which, dependent on the water level and precipitation, are still partly connected to the river.The town is located at the intersection of US Route 61 (US 61) and Highway 14. This segment of US 61 through Wilson has been designated as part of Great River Road, a tourist route to display the heritage of communities along the Mississippi River.
Economy
Tourism
In 1964 the Nodena Site was declared a National Historic Landmark, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places two years later.
Education
Public education for elementary and secondary school students is available from the Wilson-based Southern Mississippi County School District, which leads to graduation from Rivercrest High School.
WILSON,
Ark. — The little farm towns here in Delta cotton country spin by, each
rusting grain silo and boarded-up discount store fading into the next.
Then,
seemingly out of nowhere, comes Wilson, a collection of Tudor-style
buildings with Carrara marble on the bank counter, a French provincial
house with Impressionist paintings hanging on the walls and
air-conditioned doghouses in the yards.
Wilson
was once the most important company town in the South. It sits amid 62
square miles of rich farmland, most of which was once controlled by Lee
Wilson, a man almost everyone called Boss Lee. He built his fortune off
the backs of sharecroppers and brought Southern agriculture into the
modern age.
For
125 years, the Wilson family owned this town. It ran the store, the
bank, the schools and the cotton gin. For a time, the Wilsons even
minted their own currency to pay the thousands of workers who lived on
their land. Bags of coins still sit in the company vault. After the town
incorporated in the 1950's, a Wilson was always mayor.
But
now, the town — home to 905 people — is under new management, which
plans to transform the civic anachronism into a beacon of art, culture
and education in one of the poorest regions of the state.
It
might seem a far-fetched notion, except that the man who bought it is
Gaylon Lawrence Jr., 52, whose extensive financial holdings include more
than 165,000 acres of farmland in Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas and
Mississippi; five banks; the world’s largest privately owned air
conditioning distributor, USAir Conditioning Distributor; and a major
citrus operation in Florida.
Mr.
Lawrence, a tall, can-do kind of man, who prefers to check his fields
and watch the sunset than speak with reporters, had long coveted the
storied Wilson land. It is one of the largest contiguous agricultural
tracts in the Delta, its soil fed by the Mississippi River.
In
2010, when the Wilson family descendants were finally ready to sell, he
bought it for an estimated $110 million, fulfilling a dream he shared
with his father, now deceased. It just so happened that it came with a
fading Tudor town that was losing its population.
“At
first you are thinking, ‘How can I get this off my back?’ ” Mr.
Lawrence said in an interview in the living room of one of the homes he
owns in Wilson. “But then you look around and think how can you be a
catalyst? I can’t really say I am the boss. I say I am here to help.”
To
lead the transformation, he hired John Faulkner, an academic with a
background in architecture who had taught Mr. Lawrence’s two children at
a private school in Nashville. Mr. Faulkner is a de facto town manager,
historian and cultural adviser. He works with the elected town
government, which contracts with the company for most services.
“We’re still learning where the lines are drawn,” said Justin Cissell, 34, a member of the town council.
Mr.
Faulkner, tapping into money provided by Mr. Lawrence’s company,
tackled the basics first. He persuaded the telephone companies to
improve cellphone service. He painted the Tudor buildings on the square
an appropriate British green. He cleaned up the town’s hardwood groves —
rarities in the flat Delta region that the Wilson family planted 100
years ago.
Then
he talked the owner of the Elegant Farmer, a favorite restaurant in
nearby Memphis, to send a young chef and his wife to Wilson to reopen
the shuttered cafe, promising in return a farm to grow food for it.
“A good cafe is the cornerstone of a town,” Mr. Faulkner said.
The
food is a delicious anomaly in the region, but the prices have a few
people grumbling. Who pays $14 for a hamburger around here?
Still,
it is popular. Eating there on a recent afternoon were the nine
remaining members of a Presbyterian church in nearby Bassett. The
youngest was 70.
“It’s not Arkansas plate lunch portions, but it was good,” said Harper Oakes, 73.
More
sweeping changes are coming. Plans are underway to open a small private
academy called the Delta School to educate promising children of
farmers and the region’s professional class, and Mr. Lawrence said he
wanted to find ways for the town’s poorest to get ahead, too.
With
help from the state, a museum will open in 2016 near the town square to
showcase rare pre-Columbian pottery, from a Native American group
called the Nodenas, that was recovered in the 1920's by James Hampson, whose nearby archaeological site bears his name. It will be the first new building on the town square in more than 50 years.
There
are plans for concerts and British car shows and an artists’ co-op. And
Mr. Faulkner is working with the family of Johnny Cash, hoping it will
allow the town to rename its little theater in honor of the musician,
whose childhood home is 13 miles away in Dyess.
All
of it will be set amid a handful of stately mansions and Tudor
buildings, most of which were built after one of Mr. Wilson’s sons came
back from a honeymoon trip to England in the 1920's.
It all sounds a bit like something Walt Disney might have imagined. Not so, said Mr. Faulkner.
“This town has so much character we don’t have to make it up,” he said.
Still,
the distance between a little Arkansas farm town and a regional beacon
of renewal and culture seems vast. But Mr. Lawrence is a patient man,
said his wife, Lisa.
“He doesn’t take no for an answer,” she said. “If this town is not re-created, he will die trying.”
Source: Internet / nytimes
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