Johnny Cash Boyhood Home

The Johnny Cash Boyhood Home is part of the Dyess Colony, one of the largest New Deal farm resettlement projects. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration bought some 16,000 acres of swampy bottomland in Mississippi County in 1934, and about 1,300 men from Arkansas relief rolls began building roads and houses on May 22. The colony was laid out like a wagon wheel around a community center, with 500 five-room houses. Families repaid the cost of land and house and used scrip called doodlum. Like most New Deal housing projects, the colony was intended for white people only. Eleanor Roosevelt visited on June 9, 1936, when about 2,500 people lived there. Half of them left for war work in the 1940s.

Ray and Carrie Cash moved their family into a house here on March 24, 1935, and Johnny Cash graduated from Dyess High School in 1950. Arkansas State University bought the farmstead in 2011, after the house had spent five years on the state's most endangered list. His younger siblings Joanne Cash Yates and Tommy Cash sketched the rooms for the restoration, and Carrie Cash's piano is in the living room. The house opened on August 16, 2014, and joined the National Register in 2018.

Tours start at the Dyess Colony Visitors Center, 110 Center Drive, with a short film, then go through the Administration Building museum and end at the house.