Like most counties in rural Arkansas, Dallas County has been bleeding population for decades. In 1930, there were 14,671 residents. By the 2020 census, that had dropped 6,482. Of those residents, 3,396 live in Fordyce (which has dropped from a high of 5,175 in 1980). That means that outside the county seat, which is in the southeast corner of the county, there are just 3,086 residents.
When Arkansans think of sparsely populated areas, they generally think of the Ozarks and Ouachita Mountains. But some of the sparsest areas are in the pine woods of the Gulf Coastal Plain. Calhoun County, which borders Dallas County to the south, is the state's least-populated county with 4,773 residents in the 2020 census.
I've written in recent columns about quail hunting with my father almost half a century ago in Clark and Dallas counties. The quail are mostly gone these days, but I still enjoy driving the rural roads of northern Dallas County. At Dalark on the Clark County-Dallas County line, we would take Arkansas 7 south to Sparkman or Arkansas 8 east to Manning in search of quail.
Among the first families to settle in the Manning area were those of Sing Adams, Jim Adams, Walter Adams and W.A. Moore. More people came after the Camden & Malvern Railroad built tracks through the area in 1911. The railroad was purchased by what was commonly referred to as the Rock Island Line in 1913, and Manning was named for a railroad employee sent from Chicago.
A townsite was surveyed in 1914. The following year, a Baptist and a Methodist church were established.
Within a few years, Manning had multiple stores, a barbershop, hotel, cafe and cotton gin. In 1927, W.P. and C.F. Sturgis of Arkadelphia began operating a sawmill at Manning. On March 12, 1941, 112,362 board feet of lumber were shipped by rail from Manning. That was on a single day, mind you.
Part of the Sturgis brothers' mill burned in 1964, and a number of Manning families moved away for jobs at sawmills at Leola and Sparkman.
Sparkman also owes its existence to the railroad. Present-day Sparkman is less than a mile southwest of the original settlement, now known as Old Sparkman.
"Lemil Pete Sparkman--who established a lumber mill near the 17-mile trunk line Ultima Thule, Arkadelphia & Mississippi Railway--founded the settlement in 1892," Mike Polston writes for the Central Arkansas Library System's Encyclopedia of Arkansas. "On Sept. 19, 1893, a post office was opened with Sparkman as postmaster. By 1899, the town was home to about 150 people and had three blacksmiths, a cotton gin, two general stores, a sawmill, church and depot.
"Once all of the profitable timber was cut by 1910, the railroad shut down and Sparkman moved his operation. The town began to decline. Unsuccessful oil wells were drilled, resulting in surrounding land being polluted by brine that was brought to the surface. Some used these waters for medicinal purposes, but they were never successfully exploited."
Prosperity returned with the coming of the Malvern & Camden Railroad in 1913. Moore & Martin Real Estate Co. of Prescott organized Dallas Town Co. and began to market lots.
A post office opened in 1914, and the town was officially incorporated in January 1915. The Hotel Sparkman opened that year, and the Businessmen's League was formed. An electric power plant also was built. J.J. Burdine founded the first newspaper, the Sparkman News.
By the end of 1913, there were cotton gins and a blacksmith shop. By 1916, there were five general stores, a bakery, a restaurant and Merchants & Planters Bank. Rucker Lumber Co. and Arkadelphia Milling Co. opened mills in the area that lasted into the 1920s. The business loss of mill closings was recouped by the opening of the Garland Gaston Lumber Co. in 1927.
People attended movies at the Dixie Theater and ate at the Big Elephant Cafe in the 1930s. Sparkman was known across the South due to a traveling girls' basketball team, the Sparkman Sparklers. The most famous people to come from Sparkman turned out to be the vocal trio The Browns. Jim Ed and Bonnie Brown were born at Sparkman, while sister Maxine Brown was born in Louisiana.
Sparkman hit its population peak of 964 residents in the 1950 census. By the 2020 census, it was down to 355.
Sometimes our hunting adventures would take us to the northeast corner of the county near Carthage, which had a high of 687 residents in the 1940 census and was down to 222 by 2020. A historical marker there says the area was "a crossroad for settlers in pioneer times due to the abundance of wild game and water springs."
"The Little Rock & Southern Railroad was incorporated in 1902 to create a line running from Haskell in Saline County to El Dorado," writes Steve Teske of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies. "Tracks were built in northern Dallas County in 1905, the same year the Chicago, Rock Island & Southern Railroad acquired the Little Rock & Southern. Residents of the African American community Lea Ridge moved several miles to the west to live near the railroad line. The new community was named Carthage after a prominent city in northern Africa."
More than 80 percent of Carthage residents are Black.
"The city was platted in 1906 and incorporated the following year," Teske writes. "The primary industry served by railroads was the timber industry. Several railroads were constructed through the region, and their influence caused the rise of towns such as Carthage and Fordyce and the collapse of others such as Tulip and Princeton."
Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.