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Johnny Cash Boyhood Home, Other Heritage Sites Expected to Generate $10M Each Year

3 min read

A new visitor center opened last month in the rebuilt theater at the Historic Dyess Colony: Johnny Cash Boyhood Home site, Arkansas State University Heritage Sites Director Ruth Hawkins told the Rotary Club of Little Rock Tuesday.

She also announced that the annual Johnny Cash Music Festival would be transformed into a three-day Johnny Cash Heritage Festival and move from Jonesboro to Dyess in 2017. The event, set for Oct. 19-21, 2017, will include educational activities and a large concert in the field adjacent to the Johnny Cash Boyhood Home.

Hawkins said that, once her office completes all projects and obtains highway signage — which they hope to have next month — projections are that its sites will bring $10 million a year in tourism-related income and about 100 jobs to the region.

“So it really is big business for northeast Arkansas, and we’re certainly excited about it,” Hawkins said.

Planned projects include installing a walking trail, a barn and other outbuildings at the boyhood home. The barn will be the most expensive and offer classrooms and conference space, Hawkins said.

The other sites she oversees include the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum & Educational Center in Piggott, Lakeport Plantation near Lake Village and Southern Tenant Farmers Museum in Tyronza.

Hawkins said the first thing people need to know is that ASU is involved in these sites because they serve as educational laboratories for elementary and secondary students and benefit students enrolled in the university’s heritage studies Ph.D. program.

She focused on Dyess in her talk at the Rotary club’s luncheon, saying it was significant aside from being where Johnny Cash grew up.

Hawkins said Dyess was an agricultural resettlement colony under the New Deal. The government purchased 16,000 acres and divided them into 500 farmsteads. The colonists were farmers from every county in Arkansas who had been successful before the Great Depression left them out of work.

But the government only cleared two acres on each farmstead to put buildings on and the families had to clear the other 18. Many left after the 1937 flood, and their neighbors bought the acreage from those who left, Hawkins said. Eleanor Roosevelt dedicated the colony in 1936.

The Cash family, which moved to Dyess from Cleveland County, had 40 acres when they left the colony and was one of the few families that paid off a $2,300 contract for their home after moving there in 1935, she noted.

A-State acquired the colony property in 2010 and restoration work began in 2011, Hawkins said.

Exhibits were placed in the restored administration building and the home, which opened in 2014 and looks just as it did when the famous singer lived there, Hawkins said, and Cash’s youngest siblings helped.

“They were both born in that house and they have phenomenal memories. They described every stick of furniture in the house, every pattern on every bedspread,” Hawkins said.

The annual festival, and activities like the recent fundraiser “Evening with Roseanne Cash” at the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock, financed work on the boyhood home, Hawkins said. She added that Gov. Asa Hutchinson gave her office $100,000 at the end of that fundraiser.

Work at the rest of the site and others has been funded by grants from the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission and National Endowment for the Humanities.

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