This timeline was prepared by Nicolette Lloyd, UA Little Rock Public History student.<\/p>\n
1800-1836<\/strong>: The Territorial Period: Arkansas families were self-sufficient. Women played a prominent role in the family’s economic life. Farming done on hillsides; most farming was thirty acres – ten acres corn, five acres cotton and the rest cereal grains, tobacco,\u00a0potatoes<\/a> and vegetables. Anything remaining was left for livestock, hunting<\/a>, fishing or if it was a wooded area, for firewood.\u00a0Rice<\/a>\u00a0was also first attempted as a crop, but was unsuccessful.<\/p>\n 1837-1860<\/strong>: The Antebellum Period: Most of the population lived on\u00a0farms<\/a>, with few owning slaves. The women supervised meal preparation.<\/p>\n 1850s<\/strong>: Cotton<\/a>, or Gossypium, becomes the dominant crop in the Delta when it was discovered that alluvial soil produced fifty percent more cotton<\/a>\u00a0than the state’s average pounds per acre.<\/p>\n 1861-1865<\/strong>: The Civil War Period: As men left farms for war, women assumed the chores of slaughtering the hogs, planting crops and plowing the fields. After the war, cotton prices fell.<\/p>\n 1863<\/strong>: The Emancipation Proclamation frees slaves. For southern plantation owners relying on slave labor emancipation deprived them of hands to farm on their land, decreasing income.<\/p>\n Former slaves were moved to confiscated lands that had been abandoned. These “home farms” gave African Americans their first taste of managing their own affairs. Two programs were adopted – the Freedmen’s Bureau, to assist with farming, and the 1866 Southern Homestead Act, which provided “free land” from public domain in the former Confederate states.<\/p>\n 1866<\/strong>: Wage contracts were adopted, evolving into tenant-sharecropping contracts. Tenants farmers, both men and women, would work the land for a price. These tenants would rent forty acres of land from a large landowner and farm the land, usually making enough money to break even.<\/p>\n 1866-1878<\/strong>: The Reconstruction Period: And era of tenant farming, where men and women would rent a piece of land from a larger land owner if they could not buy it outright, and work the land for cash or sharecropping.<\/p>\n 1870s<\/strong>: The Farmers’ State Alliance and Industrial Union of Arkansas<\/a>\u00a0is established. It encourages equal rights and discourages monopolies on farming and labor.<\/p>\n 1870<\/strong>: Viniculture<\/a>\u00a0developed as\u00a0Swiss-German immigrants<\/a>\u00a0settled in Arkansas and survived the Prohibition by producing communion wine for churches. It would continue to the northwest area in the 1890s with Italian immigrants.<\/p>\n 1880s<\/strong>: Commercial\u00a0timber industry<\/a>\u00a0begins.<\/p>\n 1882<\/strong>: The\u00a0Grand Agricultural Wheel of the State of Arkansas<\/a>\u00a0is established to foster unity among farmers in Arkansas and to establish regulations in order to create a fair and just society.<\/p>\n 1891<\/strong>: Cotton picker strike of 1891 by a group of African-American sharecroppers to increase the wages they would earn from\u00a0picking cotton<\/a>.<\/p>\n 1899<\/strong>: In addition to low prices on cotton, erratic weather caused many to turn to\u00a0fruit<\/a>\u00a0and vegetable farming. This included\u00a0apples<\/a>.<\/p>\n 1890s<\/strong>: Disease overtook the orchards. Even with scientific intervention, apple producers were not able to bounce back and regain their significance, eventually losing to the Pacific Northwest.<\/p>\n Peaches and strawberries began to have success. Peaches<\/a>\u00a0were more successful in the Upper Arkansas River Valley and the Ouachita Mountains;\u00a0Strawberries<\/a>\u00a0were concentrated between the Little Red and White rivers in the north central region.<\/p>\n Tomatoes grew in the southeastern regions.<\/p>\n 1900-1940<\/strong>: The early 20th century saw the movement of citizens to the cities, but Arkansas remained rural and agricultural economics played key roles in clubs, such as the Home Demonstration Club and the\u00a0Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union<\/a>.<\/p>\n 1904<\/strong>: The first successful crop of rice in Arkansas produced 5,225 bushels by William H. Fuller from Nebraska. Fuller moved to Carlisle, Arkansas, after living in Louisiana to study techniques of rice production. His success prompted farmers to begin cultivating rice.<\/p>\n 1906<\/strong>: The first rice mill opened in Stuttgart. Four more mills were added by 1910.<\/p>\n 1909-1968<\/strong>: The Agricultural Extension Service is established to help farmers learn about and adopt new scientifically-based agricultural practices. Each U.S. county had (has) an Agricultural Extension Agent. This organization’s records give insight into agricultural practices and rural life in the first half of the 20th century, as well as give information about specific individuals.<\/p>\n 1916<\/strong>: The County Home Demonstration Program sends women trained in home economics to rural areas of Arkansas. They taught farm wives how to store and preserve their food, methods of canning, pickling, drying and brining, etc. as well as provided lots of information on nutrition, first aid and basic health practices. In the early days, transportation into some of the more remote areas was primitive and overnight accommodations were not available. Consequently, an agent would spend the night with one of the families she visited–sometimes even sleeping with the children in a communal bed! Their work was crucial for enabling a subsistence farmer’s family to eat during the winter from the food they produced.<\/p>\n-Mary Sudman Donovan 1920s<\/strong>: Prices began to fall and surpluses began to rise. Farmers lose their land to foreclosure and move back to tenant farming and sharecropping.<\/p>\n Governor Charles McRae (1921-1925) chairs the organization, Near East Relief Arkansas Rice Fund for Armenian Sufferers. The organizations slogan is “Buy a Bag of Rice, and Save an Orphan’s Life.”<\/p>\n 1927<\/strong>: The\u00a0Mississippi River floods in March<\/a>, covering more than 6,000 square miles. This became known as the\u00a0Great Flood of 1927<\/a>.<\/p>\n 1928<\/strong>: Governor Harvey Parnell<\/a>\u00a0(1928-1933) campaigns for re-election claiming he understands the concerns of Arkansas farmers.<\/p>\n 1929-1939<\/strong>: During the Depression, the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal agency, purchases tax-delinquent lands in Chicot, Drew and Desha Counties to develop as subsidence homesteads for poverty-stricken farmers.<\/p>\n 1930s<\/strong>: Dairying<\/a>\u00a0grew as electrical power was brought to rural areas. By 2005, however, dairying was almost completely gone.<\/p>\n 1930-1931<\/strong>: Drought<\/a>\u00a0caused many to seek public assistance and eventually the establishment of a Drought Committee. Rainfall was at its lowest during the summer of 1930, and temperatures would typically reach 107 degrees. By August, there had been seventy-one consecutive rainless days. By 1931, cotton was selling so poorly that it cost more money to plant them than the harvest would return.<\/p>\n *The banner photo shows Japanese Americans in the fields harvesting cabbages, Jerome, Arkansas.<\/p>\n\t Charline Person<\/a>\u00a0(1876-1951) was a prominent planter,\u00a0business woman<\/a>, and community leader from Garland City, in Miller County, Arkansas. She raised cotton mostly, but also grew pecans and raised livestock. She said she didn’t like to grow corn, however, because people were prone to steal it. In 1931, the Depression was in full swing in Arkansas. In 1931, she wrote to the Democrat, a newspaper in Wayne, Nebraska, thanking them for a donation of 300 chickens for Garland City. Charline took charge of distributing the chickens to those that needed them. She said people had come as far as fifteen miles away on horseback and in wagons. “I never expected to see Arkansas in this condition,” she said.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n-Colin E. Woodward, Ph.D., C.A. 1933<\/strong>: The Agricultural Adjustment Act established production controls on cotton, causing many to turn to rice.<\/p>\n 1934<\/strong>: The\u00a0Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union<\/a>\u00a0(STFU) was established in Poinsett County to reform the sharecropping system for both\u00a0sharecroppers<\/a>\u00a0and tenant farmers. STFU was integrated and allowed women to participate within the organization and administration.<\/p>\n 1939<\/strong>: Carl E. Bailey<\/a>\u00a0was arguably one of Arkansas’s most influential twentieth-century governors (1937-1941). He pushed to modernize the state through agricultural development, civil service reform, and education during the waning years of the Great Depression.\u00a0Bailey as governor<\/a>\u00a0enjoyed a good time with friends and had a sense of humor, as this\u00a0possum recipe<\/a>\u00a0attests.<\/p>\n 1940-present<\/strong>: World War II through the Modern Era: was a key time in the transformation of agriculture in Arkansas. With improved agricultural\u00a0technology<\/a>, demand for farm products and alternative job opportunities increases.<\/p>\n 1940<\/strong>: New equipment such as tractors and improved machines in planting and harvesting. This led to a drop in\u00a0draft animals<\/a>\u00a0(horses and mules) and the production of cotton. It led to new equipment and new crops, such as rice and soybeans, specifically in the Delta.<\/p>\n 1942<\/strong>: The U.S. government begins to search for land in remote, isolated locations with easy access to existing railroads and the potential for agricultural endeavors to build relocation centers to remove Japanese Americans from the western coast of the United States. Arkansas is chosen as a site for two internment camps.<\/p>\n 1940-1945<\/strong>: Despite their forced removal from the West Coast internees at the Rohwer and Jerome Relocation Centers attempted to create new bonds in their daily activities; some gardened small plots wherever they could find space, raising both vegetables and flowers;\u00a0many tended field crops<\/a>\u00a0that eventually helped feed all ten internment camps. After the war, most evidence of the camps’ existence is removed when the federal government sells off the buildings and equipment; and the land, some of the most fertile farm land in Arkansas, is sold. Oats, soybeans, winter wheat, and cotton grow where the relocation centers stood. Building the camps required clearing dense forest, and technological advances built by inmates at the camps, such as irrigation systems, helped the land become economically successful.<\/p>\n-Johanna Miller Lewis, Ph.D. 1944<\/strong>: Heifer Project International<\/a>\u00a0was established in the United States, originally titled Heifer for Relief.<\/p>\n 1945<\/strong>: Heifer for Relief sends two shipments of\u00a0cattle<\/a>\u00a0to Arkansas as part of their “Passing the Gift” program. The first shipment went to Cotton Plant, while the second shipment went to Pine Bluff.<\/p>\n 1950<\/strong>: The Flood Control Act is passed to help irrigate the rice fields with water from the White River.<\/p>\n 1953<\/strong>: Winthrop Rockefeller<\/a>\u00a0purchased 927 acres to build the\u00a0Winrock Farms<\/a>, which is noted for breeding the\u00a0Santa Gertrudis<\/a>\u00a0cattle. It also hosted\u00a0symposiums of food production<\/a>.<\/p>\n 1954<\/strong>: Watershed Protected and Flood Prevention Act, which was “to improve land already cleared for either crops or pasture.”<\/p>\n 1960s<\/strong>: Environmental movement impacts the use of\u00a0pesticides and herbicides<\/a>\u00a0used on plants and animals.<\/p>\n Lumber grows exponentially to the point where farmers plant trees where cotton and corn use to grow.<\/p>\n 1964<\/strong>: The statistics on sharecroppers and tenants had lowered so significantly that data was not collected.<\/p>\n 1970s<\/strong>: Arkansas leads the nation in rice production.<\/p>\n
\nFormer Director of the Arkansas Women’s History Institute\n
\nUA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture\n\t
\nProject Director, Life Interrupted: The Japanese American Experience in WWII Arkansas<\/em><\/a>\n