A Pictorial History

Introduction While Native Americans had inhabited the area for 10,500 years, the first white settler in the Dardanelle Bottoms was James Carden who in 1819 established a cotton farm near the banks of the Arkansas River. This became known as Carden Bottom and during the next half-century the Dardanelle Bottoms expanded encompassing the land south of Dardanelle to approximately Ola and bordered by the Arkansas River on the north and by the Petit Jean River on the south. The land, an alluvial flood plain, was rich fertile soil and soon became prime farmland. Meanwhile Dardanelle was first established as a United States Government Indian Agency in 1817. Given its location next to the Arkansas River, Dardanelle became an important riverboat town. Between 1840 and 1920 it was the major port between Little Rock and Fort Smith. Steamboats pulled into its two wharfs, one at the end of Quay Street and one at the end of South Main Street (currently named Market Street), as they off-loaded merchandise for local merchants and annually took on thousands of bales of cotton destined for Memphis, New Orleans, and St. Louis. The relationship between the rural, cotton producing Bottoms and the business community of Dardanelle created an economic and social reciprocal relationship that would last until the late 1970s. Dardanelle and the Bottoms continued to grow but remained a frontier area prior to 1861. The Civil War created chaos and destruction in and around Dardanelle as Confederate and Union troops fought for control of the Arkansas River. Union troops took control of the town in 1862, imprisoned civilian men, women, and children in a stockade at the end of Fifth and South Main Streets, and destroyed the Presbyterian and Baptist Churches. After 1865 and continuing during the Reconstruction Era violence in and around Dardanelle continually occurred as Bushwhackers (Confederate sympathizers), Jayhawkers (Union sympathizers), and common criminals took advantage of chaotic conditions in the wake of the war to steal, murder, rape, maim, and plunder. Beginning in the late 1870s the area began to rebound as law and order was reestablished, and the economy was renewed. Given periodic recessions coupled with sporadic serious flooding damage, the people of Dardanelle and the Bottoms persevered while enduring challenging hardships. Given the severity of the 1908 flood which chewed away the banks of the Arkansas River and came dangerously close to the destruction of the north side of Front Street, a levee system was established which in coming decades was expanded into the Bottoms to protect valuable farmland. The 1927 flood which caused significant damage to the town and especially in the Bottoms was soon followed by an equally devastating drought in 1930-31 resulting in increased disease, near starvation, and economic ruin. Flooding and high water, a continual threat, ravaged the Bottoms in 1874, 1892, 1898, 1904, 1908, 1927, 1935, 1938, 1939, 1941, 1943, 1945, and 1957 creating economic and health problems for the people of Dardanelle and the Bottoms. The New Deal transformed agricultural economics. Sharecroppers and tenant farmers continued to struggle. Racial segregation and the fears of poor whites that African-Americans would seize their livelihoods resulted in unequal economic and educational opportunities. African-Americans worked as tenant farmers, in low paying jobs in Dardanelle businesses, and a few owned businesses. African-American churches and schools kept a sense of community alive among their patrons. Following World War II, the Bottoms lost population as families moved away for new opportunities and better paying jobs. Cotton continued as the agricultural backbone in the Bottoms, but by the late the 1970s Dardanelle’s long, prosperous lovefest with cotton ended. Mechanized farming, the use of expensive pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, and the emergence of agribusiness all signaled the end of small farms, sharecropping, and tenant farming. The gins closed and many a Bottoms resident found jobs beginning in the 1950s in Dardanelle’s new poultry processing plant, while many small farmers contracted to raise poultry and maintain their farm operations as a sideline activity. Arkansas Valley Industries opened it headquarters in Dardanelle in 1959 and within ten years was one of the major vertically integrated poultry industry corporations in the United States. After its sale in 1969, Tyson Corporation ultimately filled its void and today is the major industrial employer in Dardanelle. Dardanelle Public Schools racially integrated in 1964-65, but with the demise of tenant farming many African-Americans living in the Upper Bottoms struggled to find jobs. Slowly through the ensuing decades the African-American population in Dardanelle dramatically declined. Just as the Bohemian immigration of the 1870s and 1880s brought new residents and greater diversity to Dardanelle, so did the new Hispanic residents who began to arrive during the 1980s and 1990s. The Bottoms are now nearly empty of people and homes. Farming continues with many absentee landowners engaging a few locals to work their farms. The rhythms of rural life replete with local hamlets and their schools, neighbors, country stores, shotgun houses, and children playing and growing into adulthood with farm families of their own, all of this, once such an integral part of the Bottoms, is now gone. Evaporated and vanished as if it had only been a ghostly vision. The land remains - empty and silent. Dardanelle has also changed dramatically as its many fine, two story homes – all beautifully maintained as gracious and welcoming bastions of the well healed, educated, and cultured – have almost completely vanished as well. The businesses of Dardanelle are now smaller in number, many less vibrant than in the past, and few carrying on the proud traditions of the Dardanelle merchants of old. What exists today in Dardanelle is a plain, dull raiment, of a once deeply embossed, rich tapestry. The Rivers and Dardanelle remain, but different – a whimper of what once was a glorious chorus of activity and endeavor. For generations people in the Bottoms and Dardanelle lived, dreamed, worked, and created their lives. Their legacy, now a part of history, still can be glimpsed in their photographs. Many old, tattered, and some without names of people and places, these photographic images provide a window into the lives of so many who experienced these places and events. Lives courageously and unapologetically lived and from whom we, who are here today, can gain a renewed appreciation for their tenacity, obstinate belief in the possibilities for betterment, and the beauty and heroism of their struggles. These were real people – some honest and decent, some willing to take advantage of others when and if they could, some racist and some not, some cheerful and some somber, some bright while others were dull, some upright and some “rounders” whose antics were both amazing and frequently illegal and morally imperfect, some energetic while others were content to simply “get by”. These were real people, and it would be wrong to paint them as something they were not. Thus, their authenticity, be it admirable or not, is valuable. Hopefully these images allow a glimpse of their true character and the lives they lived. We who live in this place today are the beneficiaries of these people’s lives, be they good or bad. It is appropriate that we praise them and say a heartfelt hallelujah for their audacious hope and determined actions while acknowledging their strength and successes as well as their shortcomings and in some cases their wrongdoings. These people of Dardanelle and the Bottoms left a worthy legacy, a legacy of abundant struggles, hope, work, defiance, and mostly honor. It is right to rejoice in the realness and dignity of their lives. Hallelujah, indeed. -- Diane Gleason