We left
Primrose UMC this morning and headed east toward Memphis. But not before
heading back to Scott for a visit to the Plantation Agricultural State Park
where Arkansas antique farm tractor aficionados were showing and running their
prize possessions today. The museum is
housed on the grounds of a once prominent seed production and farming company
named for its owner, Dortsch.
Half of the
production grounds of the company have been donated to the museum while in the
late 19th and first 2/3rds of the 20th century’s this entire town
was emblematic of cotton and bean production throughout Arkansas. Now you see
much less cotton and much more
rice, soybean and corn being produced.
The method
of ginning cotton, which is what Eli Whitney created in the early 1800’s that
saved the American cotton industry and sadly also the concept of slavery from
extinction was explained from its beginning in hand operated gins to the
massive buildings that housed the gins of Dortsch’s day. 
The gin is still the central tool in cotton
manufacture but almost all aspects of cotton farming have been mechanized so
that even share croppers ands mules are a thing of the past. Some would say good riddance.
But until
cotton was replaced by other forms of mechanized farming, and the south began
its re-birth as a center for first cheap labor and good quality manufacturing
then high tech and financial leadership it carried much of the old Confederacy
through reconstruction and the difficult Jim Crow days. 
Re-learning how to live
your whole life sometimes takes more than a single lifetime to accomplish.
There was a
second reason for us to hit the Scott Big Apple, or should we say Big Burger,
again today. Since 1984 Cotham
Mercantile, an actual former general store has been offering its HUB CAP BURGER
and other southern specialties for all and any.
Today’s Tractor Show crowd only made the Saturday lines a bit longer
than usual.
We chose the
catfish, which was as advertised. Just
the right amount and texture of breading and spices on a fish that we were told
came from open area water. Maybe it was
the very one we saw Theodorus catch yesterday at Willow Beach Park. The HUB CAP
BURGER seemed as advertised as well for those who ordered it and there were
plenty of them being grilled and consumed.
We hooked up
TOAD and drove two hours to Parkin, Arkansas, to our second prehistoric Mound
City. But this one was a very different
town than Toltec Mounds. First of all,
this was a real city, not just a ceremonial center. Second, it is the only prehistoric site in
America with a history. The Indians could
not and did not write it down. But Fernando
De Soto, the famous Spanish conquistador, did.
In fact from the time he and his 600 men and several hundred mules and
horses left the west coast of what is today the state of Florida and wound
their way for several years north and south through much of America’s southeast
to this place just west of the Mississippi there were several journals being kept by
several of their leaders.
Historians
agree, this is the only Indian town in which De Soto was received in peace. And
by this chief of as many as twenty such towns up and down several rivers like
the St. Francis. And it was here, at this town, on this mound which was topped
by the home of Casqui and also named for himself, that the Spanish records say
a wooden cross was raised upon the top of the mound and prayers were said to
end a seven year drought. And so the
story goes, the next day it rained. But the history of Casqui’s town has an
even more special and newer chapter.
Like every
single mound building community discovered by the earliest French and Spanish
explorers in the 1500’s, by the time the trappers and hunters of the 1700’s
arrived the towns were deserted and no one left to tell their tale. It is presumed that illnesses brought by the
Spanish decimated the population, but that has never been proven. Within
another hundred years most of the mounds from Ohio to the Gulf of Mexico had
been plowed under for new farms. Only
the very largest yet remain.
But here a
wonderful thing happened. While some of
the mounds were farmed over near Parkin, a 19th century section of
Parkin was built right over the site of the Indian town and around the tall
mound of Casqui without the town founders or citizens ever knowing their act of
foundation building was actually preserving the old city from future
plowing. Finally, in the 1960’s, archaeologists arrived and began
to find what they never thought they would; the town De Soto had written of
finding hundreds of years before.
By the 20th
century this part of the town of Parkin, which was close to the saw mill and
called Sawdust Hill, was the predominant residence of African Americans in
Parkin. Could the Arkansas Museum Commission dare in the heat of 1970’s civil
rights movements across the south to move a whole black community from its
multi generational space for the sake of Indian and European history?
Well, it
worked. Most residents went along with
what some called a very fair payout for their homes and better than that, they
were involved by the commission as much as possible in the actual creation of
the site, which today is as much a historical record of an Indian and a
Spaniard meeting for the first time in the 1500’s as it is of a Black American
southern community striving, and thriving, through those old Jim Crow days. All
people of Parkin are proud of THEIR state park, and the significant part they
have personally played in making the extraordinary prehistoric town of Casqui
come alive through scientific archeology and Spanish record keeping.
The rest of
our drive today was a short one; about 20 miles to West Memphis, Arkansas. We are parked in the quiet rear parking lot
of a friendly Cracker Barrel Restaurant.
No other campers; just us, beside an even quieter huge soybean field. We
can hear I-40 on the other side of the restaurant in the background, but its
white noise to us.
Supper is
over and Mona is reading a new book. I’m nearing the end of my current one, so I
think I’ll say good night and tuck into a chapter or two.
-Ken
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