Lee Wilson And Company

Sharecropper and children in front of company house at the Wilson (Mississippi County) cotton plantation; 1935.  Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Lee Wilson & Company, a diversified agribusiness headquartered in Wilson (Mississippi County), was founded by Robert E. Lee Wilson in 1885 and remained family owned and operated for approximately 125 years.

Robert E. Lee Wilson was born in 1865 in Mississippi County but moved with his mother to Memphis, Tennessee, at the age of seven after the sudden death of his father. He was orphaned at the age of thirteen when his mother died in a yellow fever epidemic; he was sent to live with an uncle. While attending school in Covington, Tennessee, he was introduced to land surveying and, through this, developed an eye for land. Wilson returned to Arkansas at the age of fifteen and worked as a wage laborer on a farm near Bassett (Mississippi County). He began farming the following year on land left to him by his father. Wilson realized the value in the hardwood forests that covered the Delta at that time and, after three years of farming, purchased a sawmill. In order to have timber for the mill, he traded a portion of his cleared land for 2,100 acres of timberland in Mississippi County. He continued farming as well, working more of the land that his father had left him.

In 1885, Wilson and his new father-in-law went into business together, buying a sawmill at Golden Lake. By the following year, the business was incorporated as Lee Wilson & Company. As the partners cleared land farther away from the mill, they established logging camps, all of which were equipped with a company store, and towns quickly grew up around them. The Mississippi County towns included Marie and Victoria (named for two of Wilson’s sisters), as well as Evadale, Keiser, and Wilson.

Unlike most timbering operations in the area that abandoned their cut-over land, Wilson cleared and drained his land and began growing cotton and, later, corn and alfalfa. Wilson also began building or buying railroads to lower the cost of exporting his goods and to aid in bringing people into the region. In addition to farming and railroads, he owned and operated banks, mercantile establishments in several towns, cotton gins, and a variety of manufacturing plants; for a while his company even produced and sold electricity.

Wilson’s record regarding labor relations is mixed. On the one hand, he treated his African-American laborers better than did many landowners in the Delta region, protecting them from abuse by managers within his company and by outsiders, including local law enforcement officials. On the other hand, employees were paid in scrip that was good only on the plantation, and property that they owned could not be removed from Wilson’s land. Those who chose to leave generally did so under the cover of darkness, relinquishing their homes and furnishings. The company was accused more than once of peonage—illegal hiring practices that held employees to their jobs against their will. In 1925, the Mexican consulate investigated charges that workers from Mexico had been promised wages of $1.50 an hour but were being paid sixty cents to a dollar an hour while being forbidden to leave. About the same time, Lee Wilson & Company was sued by an employee who claimed that he had been falsely accused of stealing from the company and then held in prison in Mississippi County until he agreed to work on the plantation picking cotton.

Wilson died in 1933, passing the company on to his son Robert E. Lee Wilson Jr. and a longtime employee, James Crain. The Wilson estate included more than 65,000 acres of farmland at that time. The company also operated most of the businesses and owned all of the houses in the town of Wilson, which the elder Wilson had created as a model town and which existed as a wholly owned subsidiary of the company. The company also owned and operated several businesses in five surrounding towns that had originally sprung up around his logging camps.

Wilson Jr. and Crain continued to operate the farming operation in a diversified manner, planting half of the land in cotton and the other half in corn and alfalfa that was primarily used to feed the thousands of mules used to pull the plows on Wilson land. They later added wheat to the crop mix.

Many changes occurred in the company after World War II. In the 1950's, the company passed into the hands of a new generation, with Robert E. Lee Wilson III taking command. The company town of Wilson, long operated by the business, began losing money. The company decided to sell the houses to their residents and incorporate the town, which would allow it to tap into badly needed tax dollars. The houses were sold at an average price of $4,000, and incorporation took place, although Wilson family members have always served as mayor. Lee Wilson & Company bought two agricultural implement dealerships, first Ford and then Case, and moved heavily into mechanization itself. A soybean oil facility was established, and the company entered the seed and agricultural chemical business.

After World War II, in an attempt to combat the labor shortage that occurred after thousands of Delta residents migrated to the urban areas, Lee Wilson & Company began importing Mexican nationals from the Bracero program to provide field labor. Each spring, the company would travel to processing facilities along the border, which were operated jointly by the United States and Mexican governments, pay a fee, and then bring the workers back for the season. Realizing an opportunity to move into other crops, especially with the amount of land allotted to row crops being reduced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the company moved into vegetable production, growing and processing lettuce, spinach, cabbage, and other green vegetables, as well as sweet potatoes and strawberries. The company operated very successfully until the Bracero program was ended abruptly in 1964, at which point it could no longer find an adequate labor supply to maintain production.

Lee Wilson & Company subsequently returned to cotton production, adding rice and soybeans. The company continued processing seed oils and, for the first time, entered ranching. This diversification allowed the business to continue to prosper. The business continued into the twenty-first century with leadership in the hands of a fourth generation of Wilsons. At one time, the company employed thousands, but mechanization reduced the need for such a large amount of labor; the company at one point employed fewer than fifty people. In October 2010, it was announced that the Wilson family was selling the company; it was purchased in December 2010 by Gaylon Lawrence of Sikeston, Missouri, and his son, Gaylon Jr., of Nashville, Tennessee, for an estimated $150 million.

Source:  encyclopediaofarkansas.net

This Partial List Of City Nicknames In Arkansas

This partial list of city nicknames in Arkansas compiles the aliases, sobriquets and slogans that the state's cities are known by (or have been known by historically), officially and unofficially, to municipal governments, local people, outsiders or their tourism boards or chambers of commerce. City nicknames can help in establishing a civic identity, helping outsiders recognize a community or attracting people to a community because of its nickname; promote civic pride; and build community unity. Nicknames and slogans that successfully create a new community "ideology or myth" are also believed to have economic value. Their economic value is difficult to measure, but there are anecdotal reports of cities that have achieved substantial economic benefits by "branding" themselves by adopting new slogans.


Some unofficial nicknames are positive, while others are derisive. The unofficial nicknames listed here have been in use for a long time or have gained wide currency.

• Alma - Spinach Capital of the World.
• Berryville - Turkey Capital.
• Brinkley - Home of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.
• Conway - The City of Colleges (The University of Central Arkansas, Hendrix College, and Central Baptist College)
• Dumas - Home of the Ding Dong Daddy
• El Dorado
  • Arkansas' Original Boomtown
  • Queen City of South Arkansas
• Emerson - The Biggest Little Town in Arkansas
• Fayetteville
  • Hog Country
  • Track Capital of the World
• Green Forest - Tomato Capital.
• Hope - Watermelon Capital of the World.
• Hot Springs - Spa City.
• Jasper - Elk Capital of Arkansas.
• Jonesboro
  • The City of Churches.
  • The Crepe Myrtle City.
• Little Rock
  • The City of Roses.
  • River City.
• Lowell - A Town with a Past, A City with a Future.
• Malvern - Brick Capital of the World.
• Mount Ida - Quartz Crystal Capital of the World.
• Mountain View - Folk Music Capital of the World.
• Nashville - Peach Capital.
• North Little Rock - Dogtown
• Stuttgart - Rice and Duck Capital of the World.
• Texarkana - Twice as Nice

Luxora, Arkansas

Luxora is a city in Mississippi County, Arkansas, United States. The population was 1,178 at the 2010 census.

Education

Public education for elementary and secondary students is provided by the Southern Mississippi County School District, which includes the Southern Mississippi County Elementary School at Luxora (prekindergarten through grade 4). Students graduate from Rivercrest High School located in Wilson.

Source: Internet

Victoria, Arkansas

Victoria is a town in Mississippi County, Arkansas, United States. The population was 59 at the 2000 census. It is named after a sister of the town's founder, Robert E. Lee Wilson.

Geography

Victoria is located on State Highway 158 east of State Highway 181, and west of Interstate 55.

Education

Public education for elementary and secondary students is provided by the Southern Mississippi County School District. Students graduate from Rivercrest High School located in Wilson.

Source: Internet

Robert E. Lee Wilson

Robert Edward Lee Wilson (March 5, 1865 – September 27, 1933) was the creator and owner of Lee Wilson and Company, a group of large cotton plantations in Mississippi County,Arkansas.

Acquiring much of his father's former swamplands, Wilson formed a logging and farming business that would become one of the largest and most successful in the United States. Wilson founded many company towns for his workers, including Armorel, Marie, Victoria, and Wilson, and was one of the most influential Arkansans of his time. A period company brochure claims the Wilson & Company grounds to be the world's largest plantation.

Robert Edward Lee Wilson
Born	Robert Edward Lee Wilson March 5, 1865 Frenchman's Bayou, Mississippi County, Arkansas
Died	September 27, 1933 (aged 68)
Resting place	Wilson town square 35°34′7″N 90°2′33″W
Other names	R. E. L. Wilson, Lee Wilson
Occupation	Owner of Lee Wilson & Company, plantation owner, railroad builder, logger
Years active	1886–1933
Known for	Lee Wilson & Company
Home town	Wilson, Arkansas
Successor	Robert E. Lee Wilson Jr, James H. Crain
Board member of	Arkansas State Highway Commission, Arkansas State University
Spouse(s)	Elizabeth Beall
Parents	Josiah Wilson and Martha Parsons Wilson

Source: Wikipedia

Wilson, AR

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.

Tudor-inspired post office, 2010

After Wilson's son, Wilson Jr., and his wife returned from their England honeymoon enthralled with the Tudor style in 1925, all subsequent public buildings were built with Tudor architecture, including retrofits to all existing public structures. The town incorporated in 1959, selling the houses to the renters living in them and gaining access to tax income it was previously excluded from as a company entity.  As technology advanced on the farm, fewer employees were needed and many moved from Wilson to seek other employment.

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

Abandoned Lee Wilson and Company warehouse, 2010

Agriculture is the dominant source of income in the area surrounding Wilson, especially the cultivation of cotton. After the abolition of slavery, sharecropping was the primary means of income for low income families in the area. Mostly for the cultivation of cotton, land would be used by sharecroppers in return for a share of the crop to the landowner. Modern machines like the cotton picker have made the manual cultivation obsolete over time as they took over the work from the hand laborers.

Tourism

Hampson Museum State Park, Wilson, Arkansas, 2010

The Hampson Museum State Park in downtown Wilson exhibits an archeological collection of early American aboriginal artifacts from the Nodena Site 5 mi (8 km) east of the town. The museum documents the culture of a civilization which existed in a 15-acre (60,703 m²) palisaded village on a meander bend of the Mississippi River in the area around 1400–1650 CE. Cultivation of crops, hunting, social life, religion and politics of that ancient civilization are topics of the exhibition.

 

One of the original Wilson family houses will be a temporary location for a small private academy. William Widmer for The New York Times

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.”

Steve Wilson, in the original offices of Lee Wilson & Company, is a descendant of Lee Wilson. William Widmer for The New York Times

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.

At one time, the Wilson family minted its own currency to pay the company’s sharecroppers. William Widmer for The New York Times

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.

A chef from Memphis was brought in to open the Wilson Café. William Widmer for The New York Times

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

The Raleigh Inn

At one time, Raleigh Springs was more than just a shopping mall. In the early 1900's, a cluster of natural springs in a wooded ravine north of Memphis lured people from all over the region to an astonishing resort — one of the fanciest places ever seen in Shelby County.

It was called, quite simply, the Raleigh Inn.

The springs, you see, acquired a reputation for curing people of all sorts of ailments. Sometime in the early 1800's, a family traveling along the old stagecoach road (now James Road) stopped overnight because their baby had fallen ill. They found several natural springs in the woods, bathed the
child in the cool water, and the next day — so the story goes — the child was cured. That’s the legend behind Raleigh’s most famous spring, appropriately called the Baby Spring, and the Raleigh Springs soon became a mecca for Memphis society, who journeyed out into the country to “take the waters.” After all, whether it cured you or not, it had to taste better than Memphis water, which — in the days before we stumbled onto our artesian water supply — came from cisterns and muddy wells.

As early as 1842, a Raleigh businessman named David Coleman built a hotel near the springs, and in 1866 another hotel owner persuaded (meaning: paid) a St. Louis doctor to testify that the water did indeed have medicinal value: “The compounding of so many valuable minerals in such a happy combination guarantees to the invalid that the Great Apothecary, the God of Nature, has designed them for the healing of these creatures who, by violating His laws of health, have rendered medical aid necessary.” Or so he said.

In other words, drinking clean water was good for you.

Events changed dramatically in 1892, when the tobacco-rich Duke family of North Carolina decided to erect a grand hotel in the ravine just north of James Road. Costing more than $100,000 — an astonishing sum at the time — the Raleigh Inn was a rambling wooden structure, four stories tall, with turrets and balconies and verandas and all sorts of things to make visitors ooh and aah and proclaim it the most beautiful thing they had ever seen.

The springs themselves were enhanced with graceful gazebos, all linked to the hotel with stone paths that wound through the deep woods. Orchestras played here on weekends, dancers flocked to the Raleigh Inn’s grand ballroom, and Raleigh became the place to be.

Then it all came to an end. The water table dropped, and the springs dried up. And Memphians found their own source of clean water, so they didn’t have to make the long trek to Raleigh anymore. Sitting on the veranda of the Raleigh Inn wasn’t really much fun compared to the thrilling roller-coaster rides at the new East End Park, or the amazing “moving pictures” they were beginning to show on Main Street.

The old hotel closed and was converted into the Maddox Seminary for Young Ladies, and a few years later turned into the James Sanitarium. On the night of May 14, 1912, a patient smoking in bed set the place on fire, and the hotel burned to the ground. That was ironic, considering that one of the goals of treatment at the sanitarium was to battle addiction to tobacco. And even more ironic considering the building was constructed in the first place by a family who made millions from tobacco.

The hotel/school/sanitarium site was abandoned, and the old springhouses tumbled down. Many years ago, the landowner showed me around the property, and if you knew where to look, you could kick through the underbrush and find piles of charcoal where the inn had once stood. And you could also find the ruins of an old gazebo, all vine-covered and creepy (shown above), along with the bullet-riddled tin roof of the Umbrella Spring.

Little else remains of the Raleigh Inn except for memories.

By: Vance Lauderdale

Photograph Courtesy Benjamin Hooks Central Library

Source:  mbqmemphis