Burdette, Arkansas

Around 2008, the Hale family of Burdette donated many pieces of vintage agricultural items to the Widner-Magers Farm for use in our living history museum. Over the years, students and adults enjoyed those donations with many hands-on activities. We will always be thankful for these donations, which will remain for the education of future generations. It has been people like the Hales who made it possible for us to tell the Northeast Arkansas Delta story.

Although we played basketball against Burdette often in the 1960s, I knew little about the town or how it started, but over recent years I have collected many stories and much information. Ruth Hale also presented us with a book about the Burdette Plantation. Although it is too lengthy to reproduce here, below you'll find a couple of good sources, ending with the life achievements of Ruth Hale, who passed away in February of this year. (2020)

(To view more vintage farm equipment donated by other farms in Northeast Arkansas, go to:

 DUNCAN FARMSTEAD WEBSITE

from: The Encyclopedia of Arkansas

Burdette (Mississippi County) is located nine miles south of Blytheville (Mississippi County) on State Highway 148 just off U.S. Highway 61, known as the Great River Road. Burdette is named after Alfred Burdette Wolverton, who in the early 1900s was one of the first lumbermen to settle in the area. It was incorporated as a company town by workers of the Three States Lumber Company of Wisconsin in May 1905. Prior to Three States Lumber Company’s arrival, the area had been swampland and uninhabitable. Burdette Township split from Fletcher Township in 1908 to create the community of Burdette. Burdette proper is located within the larger Burdette Township (a township being a division of a county), which includes farming and lumber operations.

Three States Lumber Company finished construction of the first sawmill in Burdette in June 1906. By 1922, the town had a hotel, wooden sidewalks, a power plant, a cooperage company, two separate schools (for black and white children), a large park with a baseball diamond, an open-air theater, a community canning kitchen, a post office, and an ice cream parlor. The Blytheville, Burdette, and Mississippi River Railroad was incorporated in 1906 with a line from the Burdette mill to Wolverton Landing on the Mississippi River. The track was later extended from Blytheville to Luxora (Mississippi County).

During the company’s seventeen years of logging operations in Burdette Township, Three States sold its cut-over lands to farmers, and the population of the entire Burdette Township reached more than 900 by 1920.

In the fall of 1913, Three States Lumber Company hired James Feagin Tompkins to manage the company’s “home farm,” or what became known as the Burdette Plantation. While tenancy and sharecropping were already on the rise in Mississippi County, Tompkins introduced the crop-lien system to Three States’ operation. With the hiring of Tompkins and the creation of the Burdette plantation, the Three States Lumber Company town of Burdette began a transition from a company-operated lumber town to an independently owned agricultural community.

Three States Lumber Company systematically sold the land in and around the town of Burdette to local businessmen and farmers over the course of forty years. Three States invested heavily in its Burdette plantation even with major economic and environmental crises. The company maintained a viable agricultural business through the exploitation of their tenants and sharecroppers. However, Three States found a way, eventually, to get out of its agricultural interests by allowing its tenants to lease to buy throughout the 1920s and 1930s, decades that saw some of the worst agricultural depressions the United States had ever experienced.

Three States Lumber Company leased the 2,200-acre Burdette plantation to James Feagin Tompkins and a group of investors in 1922 with the option to buy. The Burdette plantation served as a testing ground for agricultural research development by the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) beginning in 1923. Burdette became known for its advancements in agricultural production in the mid-twentieth century. In conjunction with the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Bureau of Plant Industry, agronomists conducted cotton and corn varietal and fertilizer experiments. They tried new types of seed and fertilizer to improve cotton yields. Several different cotton varieties and strains were developed by breeders through these testing trials located west of the plantation headquarters. These included Burdette Express, Burdette Lone Star, Burdette Trice, Burdette Acala, and Burdette Delfos. As a result, Burdette became locally celebrated for its many different varieties of cotton and corn.

Three States offered a lease-with-option-to-purchase cotton contract to Burdette farmers and the Burdette Plantation in 1932. The contract called for 100 bales of cotton in payment for forty acres of land and was not contingent on the price of cotton. This unique plan for agricultural development in the Mississippi River Valley was seen as progressive for its time but also served the interests of Three States in removing itself from its agricultural enterprise in Burdette. Cotton prices increased as a result of the New Deal programs, and cotton growers like Tompkins received government subsidy and parity payments. Tompkins and his investors were able to purchase the Burdette Plantation by 1935.

Burdette thrived as an active farming community until the 1960s, when the mechanization of agriculture and development of chemical weed control decreased the demand for labor. The Blytheville School District and Burdette High School consolidated in the early 1990s, and the Blytheville School District closed the Burdette schools in 2001. The Burdette School Complex Historic District is on the National Register of Historic Places for its historic architecture and significance to a once thriving lumber and agricultural community. There are currently no churches or businesses in the community.

from: The National Register of Historic Places

In the early part of the twentieth century rural communities in Mississippi County were relatively isolated because of poor transportation. Roads were unpaved and mostly unimproved. Automobiles were rare and most travel was by mule-drawn wagon. It was in this environment that Burdette was founded. It was originally a company town owned by the Three States Lumber Company. The town was incorporated in 1905 when the company opened a mill there. When workers began moving into the town with their families the growing need for a school was felt throughout the community. 

In 1922 the timber and lumber operations were complete and most of the town's buildings were moved to other locations. Before that time Three States had developed a farming operation on its cleared land and had begun to sell the newly cleared land for agricultural purposes. James Feagin Tompkins, who had been the farm manager for Three States, formed Burdette Plantation Incorporated in order to purchase a large block of land. The town continued on a reduced scale, but was still essentially a company town, this time supporting the plantation operation. Burdette Plantation continued to support the school. James Tompkins became a Board member in 1918 and served on the Board until his death in 1936.  

The town of Burdette was once a thriving lumber company town that successfully made the transition to an agricultural town when the timber was all cleared. With less labor-intensive agricultural practices the town's population has drastically declined. The Burdette School Complex is the most intact group of buildings that survive from the town's heyday. The school grew and declined with the town for almost eighty school terms. Although this year's class will be the last, the complex will continue to be held in high accord by generations of town citizens who were educated at the facility. The Burdette School Complex Historic District is being nominated to the National Register with state significance under Criterion C for its varied architecture and as the most extant historic school complex that is known to exist in Arkansas. It is also being nominated under Criterion A for the educational role it has played in the town of Burdette. 

from: Blytheville Courier News

Ruth Carlton Hale, age 86 of Burdette, Arkansas passed away peacefully on February 27, 2020.

Ruth was born in Griffin, GA in 1934. She graduated from Blytheville High School in 1951 and then attended Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans. Later, she transferred to the University of Arkansas where she was a member of Pi Beta Phi. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Education and went on to receive a Master of Science in Library Service from Columbia University in New York City.

Upon graduation Ruth moved to Austin, TX where she worked as a librarian at the University of Texas. She later moved to Atlanta, GA as an archivist in Georgia Tech’s library. After her retirement, she returned to her beloved home in Burdette, AR.

Ruth volunteered countless hours at the Delta Gateway Museum in Blytheville and Mississippi County Museum in Osceola.  She was a prolific reader of all types of literature and appreciated classical music. Ruth was the epitome of a historian. She worked tirelessly to have architecture from her hometown of Burdette preserved on the historic register. She archived and preserved everything from historic documents and local buildings to a box of photos, clippings, and awards for each and every family member.

She was preceded in death by her parents, George Albert Hale Sr. and Sara Tompkins Hale, of Burdette, AR. She leaves a brother, George Albert Hale Jr.; a niece, Charlee Hale Moore and her husband Tim; nephew, George A. "Trey" Hale III and his wife Stephanie, all of Burdette; five great nieces and nephews, Sara Allison Goff  and her husband JT, Kathryn Hale Knuth  and  her husband Chad, Christopher Gregory Predmore, George Albert "Bo" Hale IV and Kate Stevenson Hale; 5 great great nieces and nephews Leah Jett Goff, John Oliver Goff, Layla Lynn Huffman, Luke Bennett Knuth and Braxton Hale Predmore.