Dyess Colony Center

About this property

Dyess is a town in Mississippi County, Arkansas, which was founded as Dyess Colony in 1934 by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration as part of the Roosevelt administration's agricultural relief and rehabilitation program. It was the largest agrarian community established by the Federal Government during the Great Depression. As of the 2020 census, the population of Dyess was 339, down from 410 in 2010. Dyess Colony was the boyhood home of country music singer Johnny Cash. Dyess Colony was established in Mississippi County in 1934 as part of the New Deal efforts of Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide economic relief to destitute workers in the Great Depression. The experiment was the largest such community-building experiment established by the federal government during these years. The project was established by Mississippi politician and cotton planter William R. Dyess (1890–1936), director of the Arkansas Emergency Relief Administration, who initially sought the establishment of a self-supporting agricultural community housing 800 families upon unused Mississippi Delta farmland. Director Dyess established the entity remembered to history as "Dyess Colony" and as "Colonization Project No. 1", plans for which were submitted to chief of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) Harry Hopkins early in 1934. The project was approved by Hopkins in March 1934. Some 15,144 acres (61.29 km2) of unimproved land were purchased by Dyess for the colonization project at the cost of $9.05 per acre, with the parcel redeemed for the payment of unpaid back taxes in this amount. The site consisted primarily of swamp and cutover forest land, although containing deep topsoil deposited by the Mississippi River, part of what was then the most productive cotton farming county in the entire United States. The project's scope was immediately scaled back to 500 family parcels, with the participants to be recruited from Arkansas sharecroppers and tenant farmers from across the entire state. Thousands of applicants were carefully screened, and eligibility requirements included being an experienced farmer made destitute through no fault of his own and being an Arkansas resident "of good moral background" in good health, under the age of 50, and white. Funds for the purchase of land were provided by FERA in the form of a grant to the Arkansas Emergency Relief Administration, which initially managed the project. Subsequently, a new entity was established known as Dyess Colony Inc., the stock of which was held in trust by the US Secretary of Agriculture, and management and control passed over to the managing board of that company.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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