Graysonia

A boomtown on a dirt road with nothing populated anywhere near it

Graysonia was a sawmill boomtown in Clark County, Arkansas, on the Antoine River, and it is now a ghost town at the end of a dirt road halfway between Arkadelphia and Alpine, in what people locally call the middle of nowhere. No populated community lies near it, and only a few scattered homes stand within a few miles.

It began with timber. In 1902 the businessmen William Grayson and Nelson McLeod became the principal stockholders of the Arkadelphia Lumber Company, and in 1907, with the forest around their old site exhausted, they moved the operation to the Antoine and named the new town for Grayson. It opened with 350 people, a number that more than doubled at its peak, when better than a thousand lived there. Around 1907 the company built kilns, a fire house, a water reservoir, the main mill and rows of shotgun houses, and within a decade there were several hundred homes, a hillside restaurant and cafés, three hotels, a movie theatre, a school, a church, running water and electricity. It was a company town, but unusually it incorporated and elected its own officials. The Memphis, Dallas and Gulf railroad served it from 1909 until the mid-1930s.

The First World War made Graysonia's mill one of the largest in the South. Between 1915 and 1920 more than 500 workers turned out 150,000 board feet a day, against about 25,000 at an ordinary mill like the one at Mauldin. In 1924 the Bemis family bought in, renaming the business the Ozan-Graysonia Lumber Company, and the next five years were its best.

Then the timber and the money ran out together. The company cut and moved, as lumber outfits of the day did, and the Great Depression finished the job. The planer mill kept going for a while on stored lumber, and plans for several small mills came to nothing. When cinnabar, the ore of mercury, was discovered in southwest Arkansas in 1930, workers were urged to stay on for the quicksilver mines, but the rush was short-lived, and the people drifted off to other mills and mines. The directors told stockholders the land was not worth the taxes. In 1937 the Bemises moved some of the mill's equipment to a new mill at Delight.

The post office closed on 19 November 1950, and that year's census counted no one. The last known resident, a retired logger named Brown Hickman, left in 1951. Today only the foundations of a few buildings remain in the woods.