W. R. Dyess was a Mississippi County plantation owner who went to work for the New Deal. As Arkansas's first administrator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, he proposed to Harry Hopkins that tenant farmers could own their own land. The government bought some 16,000 acres of swampy, uncleared bottomland at an average of $2.50 an acre, and on May 22, 1934, about 1,300 men from the relief rolls began cutting roads and drainage ditches. It was Colonization Project No. 1.
Who could apply
Interviewers in each county judged volunteers on a six-page application. Families had to be destitute, with a farming background and a "good moral background," and husband and wife both had to be fit enough to clear land. The husband had to be under fifty. Historian Dan Pittman records one more requirement: he had to be "a member of the white race." Black families were excluded. Black workers could take federal construction jobs, but they slept in segregated barracks and could not live in the community they helped build.
In November 1935 the Resettlement Administration announced Lakeview, in Phillips County, the first resettlement project designed to address landlessness among Black farmers in the rural South. About 5,600 acres were distributed there and 91 farms settled, against roughly 500 at Dyess.
Twenty acres and a ledger
Each Dyess family received a house of three to five rooms, a barn, a mule, a cow and groceries until the first crop, on twenty to forty acres. All of it was an advance to be repaid. The first year was a trial, after which a farm agent and a home economist judged each family, and after about three years a family that had repaid could receive a deed.
Cooperation was limited. Families worked their own farms, sold cotton together, shared a gin and a cannery, and spent a local scrip called doodlum. The first 13 families arrived in October 1934. Ray and Carrie Cash, one of five families selected from Cleveland County, came in March 1935 with five children, aged one to thirteen.
Dyess died in a plane crash on January 14, 1936, and the colony was dedicated under his name on May 22, when 482 families lived there. Eleanor Roosevelt came a few weeks later and spoke from the steps of the administration building. She wrote in her column that she decided the colonists "had character and courage to make good when an opportunity offered." About 2,500 people lived there at its peak.
What became of it
By 1938, 115 families had earned deeds and 300 more were recommended to stay. Federal control passed through three agencies, and some residents objected that it resembled the old plantation system. During World War II about half the residents left for war work and did not return. Dyess incorporated as a town in 1964 and had 339 residents in 2020.
Johnny Cash lived there until he graduated from Dyess High School in 1950. The administration building joined the National Register in 1976. Tours of the Johnny Cash Boyhood Home start at the Dyess Colony Visitors Center on Center Drive. In Tyronza, the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum tells of a union that organized Black and white tenants in the same decade.