I really can’t think of a much better way to spend a hot day in late May than this: Sitting in a nice home in the middle of a cotton field, talking politics with intelligent people and eating great meatloaf, slaw, mashed potatoes, peas fresh from the field, sweet squash relish and cornbread.

That’s how I spent the lunch hour Thursday.

The shame was that I had to return to work in downtown Little Rock rather than spending the entire afternoon on the Baucum Plantation at the edge of North Little Rock near Scott.

The occasion was a luncheon hosted by Brenda Fulkerson, the epitome of a warm, witty Southern hostess.

I had attended one of Brenda’s luncheons several years ago. The co-host was Win Paul Rockefeller. The event could best be described as an “Arkansas salon” with interesting people freely discussing interesting topics over good food. These luncheons were, in a sense, an attempt to continue in a small way the storied tradition of the daily luncheons Mr. Witt Stephens would host in his downtown Little Rock office.

After Win Paul died at a tragically young age, Brenda halted the luncheons. Recently, she called me and said it was time to revive the Baucum Plantation events. She asked if I would invite six people to talk politics in this fascinating election year. I happily agreed to do so.

A major condition of these luncheons is that they’re “off the record,” as we used to say in the newspaper business. Therefore, I won’t name the six people who joined Brenda and me for lunch Thursday. And I won’t write about our discussion, as informative as that post would be. Suffice it to say that these were six of the top political minds in Arkansas. They understand our state, its people and its history. I wish the discussion could have continued all afternoon.

At any rate, I must say that a visit to Scott makes for a great outing even if you’re not fortunate enough to be invited to lunch on the Baucum Plantation.

On Saturday, following my youngest son’s baseball game, we drove out to Scott to make sure I could find the Baucum house. I didn’t want to appear lost on Thursday while driving a car filled with guests. After finding the house, we went to the original Cotham’s for lunch. The place was packed.

During the more than nine years I worked at the state Capitol, I was a regular at Cotham’s In The City on Third Street (originally a TGI Friday’s). It was easy to just walk down the hill. But it’s safe to say the Little Rock location just can’t match the charm of the original Cotham’s Mercantile, housed in a wooden store built in 1917.

The Cotham’s website outlines the history this way: “It has served as a general mercantile store in the Scott area for farmers and plantation owners since its beginning. It has also served as a military commissary and lockup for local law violators awaiting trial by a circuit-riding judge. In 1984, a small eating area was opened to serve lunch to area farmers. Soon discovered by prominent politicians, notably Bill Clinton and David Pryor, the restaurant suddenly became the place to eat and greet for distinguished Arkansans from all walks of life.”

Indeed, it was David Pryor who first told me about Cotham’s when I was living in Washington in the late 1980s and visiting his office each day in my role as a reporter. Last year, I wrote on this blog that if I had to pick one Arkansan with whom to have lunch once a week, it would be David Pryor. And Cotham’s would be a nice location for such gatherings.

Following lunch (I had a hubcap cheeseburger, much to my wife’s chagrin), I took Melissa and Evan to the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism’s Plantation Agriculture Museum. We were fortunate that the park’s longtime curator, Randy Noah, was there on this Saturday afternoon and willing to give us a tour. The museum does an outstanding job of explaining the role cotton and those who raised it played in the state’s history.

The main part of the museum is housed in a brick building that was built in 1912 by Conoway Scott Jr. to house a general store. In 1929, a wing was added to the building to house the Scott post office. In the 1960s, plantation owner and seed developer Robert L. Dortch bought the building and began turning it into a museum that would help visitors experience life on a cotton plantation. Dortch even began an excursion train service. I can remember my parents taking me to ride the train, which is now in Eureka Springs.

Dortch died in 1972, and the museum closed in 1978. A powerful member of the Arkansas Legislature from Lonoke County, Rep. Bill Foster, went to work to have the state take over the museum. Foster’s bill was approved by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Clinton in 1985. The state’s Plantation Agriculture Museum opened in 1989.

After Amendment 75 to the Arkansas Constitution (the one-eighth-of-a-cent sales tax) was approved by Arkansas voters in 1996, some of the proceeds from that tax were used to resurrect the Dortch cotton gin. The building was rebuilt, but the 1920s Munger cotton gin and press inside are the originals. I’m not sure there’s a finer example in the country of a historic cotton gin that’s open to the public.

The Parks and Tourism Department also has restored one of Dortch’s seed warehouses. Dortch gained a national reputation for the cotton and soybean seeds he developed.

For anyone who wants a better understanding of agriculture and its role in this state’s development, the Plantation Agriculture Museum is worth a visit of at least two hours. It’s open from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. each Tuesday through Saturday and from 1 p.m. until 5 p.m. each Sunday.

Here’s how the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture (www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net) describes the early history of Scott: “William Scott emigrated from Kentucky at an unknown date to the area that would become the town of Scott. His son, Conoway Scott Sr., was born in 1815. By 1862, the Scott family owned 2,000 acres, 10 slaves and other property valued at $37,895. Conoway Scott Sr. died in 1866 just before the birth of his son, Conoway Jr.

“Conoway Scott Jr. eventually operated several successful ventures, including the family plantation and general store. Scott’s landholdings were eventually crossed by the St. Louis & Southwestern Railroad, also known as the Cotton Belt Line, and Scott’s Station or Scott’s Crossing became a regular stop. When damaged, the sign at Scott’s Station was shortened to Scott’s and then just Scott, giving the name to the town. By the turn of the 20th century, a thriving community dominated by cotton plantations was well established. As the cotton farms grew in size and number, merchants opened several general stores.”

While in Scott, it’s also worth your time to visit the Scott Plantation Settlement. A group of area residents formed an organization in 1995 known as Scott Connections Inc. The Scott Plantation Settlement covers just more than eight acres of the Illallee Plantation. Arthur Alexander and Otelia George Alexander had purchased the plantation in 1898. Their daughter Virginia later donated the eight acres.

An early owner of the land was U.S. Sen. Chester Ashley.

After the 1995 creation of Scott Connections Inc., 12 structures were moved to the site from neighboring farms. The relocation of those structures was underwritten by a grant from the Roy and Christene Sturgis Charitable Trust in 1999. There were three tenant houses, a blacksmith shop, a corn crib, a dogtrot house, a cotton pen, a smokehouse, a wash house, a medical clinic, an outhouse and the original Dortch ‘big house.’

An additional 13 structures have been added. The Cotton Belt depot was moved to the site following a $50,000 grant from the Stella Boyle Smith Trust. Other additions include a sorghum mill, a cook’s house and a one-room plantation school.

A visit to the Plantation Agriculture Museum, lunch at Cotham’s, a visit to the Scott Plantation Settlement — it makes for an interesting day.

If you’re really lucky, you might even be invited to a private lunch on the Baucum Plantation one of these days.

Each year, the 11-member board of the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council meets to decide how to spend the money that comes from the state’s real estate transfer tax.

The program has been a good one for the state ever since the council was created by the Legislature in 1987. Grants are used to maintain and enhance state-owned natural areas, historic sites and outdoor attractions. It’s funding that might not come otherwise for such facilities in an era of tight state budgets.

During a meeting earlier this month, the commission awarded grants for everything from improvements to the Garvan Woodland Gardens at Hot Springs to the planned Trout Nature Center at Mountain Home to the Arkansas Forestry Commission’s Poison Springs State Forest in Nevada and Ouachita counties.

One particular grant caught my eye. Arkansas State University will receive $337,888 for restoration work at the site of the Dyess Colony in Mississippi County.

I’ve long believed we’ve not done nearly enough as a state to promote the history of this resettlement colony for impoverished farmers. We should cash in on the fact that Johnny Cash lived there as a boy. The folks at Arkansas State and a group of dedicated volunteers are out to correct that oversight.

“While the Roaring ’20s had a euphoric effect on much of the nation, the agricultural economy of Arkansas did not share in the prosperity,” Nancy Hendricks writes in the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. “By the end of the 1920s, one disaster after another devastated the small independent farmers of the state. The flood of 1927 was followed by drought. The stock market crash of 1929 was followed by bank failure. By the end of 1930, approximately two-thirds of Arkansas’ independent farmers lost their farms and fell into tenancy.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president in 1932 and established the Works Progress Administration as one of a bevy of agencies designed to fight the Great Depression. The first WPA administrator for Arkansas was William Reynolds Dyess, who was part of a group of politically powerful plantation owners from Mississippi County. He made a suggestion to the Roosevelt administration: Have the Federal Emergency Relief Administration purchase 16,000 acres of bottomland hardwoods in Mississippi County. Pump $3 million of federal money into the area so families could move there and clear about 20 acres each for cultivation.

The resettlement colony was established in May 1934. Federal officials searched the state’s relief rolls and then brought almost 1,300 men to Mississippi County to begin building roads and homes.

“The colony was laid out in a wagon-wheel design, with a community center at the hub and farms stretching out in the middle,” Hendricks writes. “The roads leading out were simply numbered rather than named, as in Road 14. The men dug ditches to drain the land, and they built 500 small farmhouses. Each house had five rooms with an adjacent barn, privy and chicken coop. The houses were whitewashed clapboard, each having two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a dining room, plus a front and back porch. Apart from these improvements to the land, the colonists were expected to do the rest themselves. Like all New Deal housing projects, it was intended for white people only.”

As the houses were finished, interviewers fanned out across the state to begin the application process. The first of about 500 families arrived in the fall of 1934 and began clearing the land in order to plant corn and cotton. In early 1936, a month after Dyess was killed in an airplane crash, what had been known as Colonization Project No. 1 officially became the Dyess Colony. The national media focused on the unique project and the nation’s first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, paid a visit in June 1936.

By then, there were almost 2,500 residents. Ray Cash and Carrie Rivers Cash headed one of the five families selected to move to Dyess Colony from Cleveland County in 1936. Their son John was identified as “J.R.” in the Dyess High School yearbook when he graduated as the class vice president in 1950.

Dyess was incorporated in 1964. Each summer, a reunion is held for former residents of the resettlement colony and their descendants. Cash’s song “Five Feet High And Rising” is based on a January 1937 flood that forced the colony to be evacuated.

In his song “Dyess, Arkansas,” Buddy Jewell sings: “I know there’s bigger cities, but there ain’t no better town.”

I’m fascinated by Mississippi County and its plantation culture. Situated in a corner of the state, it’s in many ways a place apart.

I have a friend with Mississippi County roots. He had family members who once lived at Keiser and would refer to “living on Keiser time,” reinforcing that notion of a place that’s different from the rest of Arkansas.

You’ve heard of company towns, right? Well, in some respects, Mississippi County was a “company county” thanks to Robert Edward Lee Wilson, who built what at one time was considered the largest cotton plantation in the South at 65,000 acres.

The man who later would be known as “Boss Lee” had been born in 1865 on a 2,300-acre plantation that his father carved from the swamps of Mississipppi County. Wilson’s father died in 1870, leaving his young son 400 acres. Wilson lived with his mother in Memphis while a brother-in-law served as guardian of the property. Wilson went to court in 1882 to be declared “of age” so he could manage the property. He married Elizabeth Beall in December 1884 and began to build in empire after going into partnership with his father-in-law, Socrates Beall, and creating the Wilson & Beall Lumber Co.

Valuable lumber was shipped out by rail to St. Louis and Chicago. The land left behind then was drained and placed into agricultural production. Wilson incorporated Lee Wilson & Co. in 1904.

“He appointed managers of his various units and required them to report to the head office located at Wilson,” University of Arkansas historian Jeannie Whayne has written. “He founded several towns. He established a bank in 1908, which opened new credit and capital opportunities to him and helped sustain his enterprises through a series of challenges including floods, droughts and the Great Depression.”

Wilson died in September 1933. But the company still remains in the family. It’s one of the top agri-business operations in the region.

According to an article in the Special Collections section of the University of Arkansas library, Boss Lee had done things differently from the start.

“Most lumbering companies sold their freshly cut timberlands,” the article states. “Not Boss Lee. He chose to clear and drain his properties. Over many centuries, constant floods had laid down some of the richest alluvial soil in the world. It was in these deep black, rich lands that Wilson began to plant cotton. The arrival of the Kansas City, Fort Scott & Memphis Railway proved to be a tremendous boon to Lee Wilson & Co., allowing them to market their timber more quickly and far more cheaply than before.

“The early years of the company demonstrate the tenuous nature of agriculture in the Delta counties. Breaks in the levee caused tremendous April floods in 1912 and 1913. Yet Wilson’s tenacity was unmatched. He built several small railroads to facilitate the transportation of goods and timber. Wilson’s first line spanned the distance from Wilson to Marie, to Keiser and on to Victoria. Later the company bought the Jonesboro, Lake City & Eastern Railway, running from Jonesboro to Lake City. A spur route, branching off at Dell, ran down to Wilson.”

The massive timber operations and the draining of the swampy areas made Mississippi County the state’s most heavily agricultural county. At one time, it grew more cotton than any county in the country.

The Special Collections narrative goes on to state that Wilson “played crucial roles in the organization of the county’s drainage districts despite serious and often dangerous opposition of many of the county’s tax-weary, cash-strapped landowners, men who did not see the long-term economic advantages of drainage.”

The next time you’re headed up Interstate 55 toward St. Louis, take the Wilson exit and spend some time in this fascinating small town. The Wilson family made sure the downtown commercial district was constructed in the Tudor style (R.E.L. Wilson Jr. and his wife got the idea on a wedding trip to England) and that its streets were lined with cottonwood trees. The Wilson family wanted this to be a model town that would attract favorable national attention.

Among other benefits, residents of Wilson had access to health care from company doctors in the 1930s at a time when most rural Arkansans never saw a doctor. Lawn maintenance was included in the rental price for homes.

Indeed, Mississippi County stands apart from other counties with its unique history and culture.

As I wrote in a previous post, I can see the old Hotel Sam Peck from my office window here in downtown Little Rock. It’s the place that the man friends called Win and aides called WR first called home after coming to Arkansas in 1953.

It didn’t take long, however, for Petit Jean Mountain to become Winthrop Rockefeller’s real home. It was atop this mountain that Rockefeller built his model ranch, a place that the introductory film shown during the Winthrop Rockefeller Legacy Weekend called “a model for progress, an inspiration for change.”

Rockefeller obviously had resources that other Arkansans didn’t have. But he wanted to use those resources wisely to show the types of things that could happen in what was primarily a rural, impoverished state. He also wanted to give Arkansans a sense of pride in the process.

I think most Arkansans were proud that a Rockefeller had chosen to leave New York and live among us.

He brought the famed Santa Gertrudis breed of beef cattle to Petit Jean. The tropical beef breed had been established in far south Texas in my wife’s hometown of Kingsville. The cattle were named for the Spanish land grant where Captain Richard King originally established the King Ranch. When the breed was officially recognized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1940, it became the first beef breed developed in the United States.

Rockefeller’s annual cattles sales atop the mountain attracted people from across the country.

Winrock Farms, however, would become more than a cattle ranch. Much more.

There were row-crop farming operations in the Arkansas River Valley below and a branch of the farm in east Arkansas.

More than anything, though, Rockefeller wanted the mountain to be a place where people would come, discuss ideas and have time for contemplation in a relaxing setting away from their homes.

“I do think he found a certain amount of peace right here on this mountain,” former journalist and Rockefeller friend Dorothy Stuck said last Saturday. “The big task now is to keep his legacy alive.”

It was fitting that I was on the ranch last Saturday, May 1. It was his birthday. Had he lived, WR would have been 98.

Rockefeller died of pancreatic cancer on Feb. 22, 1973, in Palm Springs, where he had gone to escape the cold weather. His ashes were brought back to his beloved Petit Jean.

The year of Rockefeller’s death, Winrock International was established on 188 acres that had served as the heart of the ranch. For three decades, the global development organization called Petit Jean Mountain home before making a decision to build a new headquarters in the Riverdale area of Little Rock. With the organization’s move off the ranch, the property reverted to the Winthrop Rockefeller Charitable Trust.

The board of the trust had a decision to make. It made a wise one.

The board decided to team with the University of Arkansas System and create a world-class conference center and educational institute. Using funds from the trust, almost 30,000 square feet of existing space was remodeled. New lodging facilities were constructed. Extensive landscaping was done. More than $20 million has been spent in recent years to create a place that now hosts everything from art exhibitions to culinary classes to native tree identification workshops.

You can also stay at the institute just as you would a resort. Registered guests have access to a fitness center, indoor tennis and basketball courts, paddle boats, fishing opportunities, bicycles, jogging trails and walking trails. The River Rock Grill is open each Thursday, Friday and Saturday for lunch and dinner.

There’s a well-done gallery that tells the Rockefeller story and an interactive theater. The permanent exhibit in the gallery is titled “Winthrop Rockefeller: A Sphere of Power and Influence Dropped Into a River of Need.” More than 300 restored and enlarged photographs are incorporated into 180 murals and interpretive panels broken into these areas: The Man, His Heritage, The Mountain, His Influence and His Legacy. 

The institute’s website (www.uawri.org) describes it this way: “During his 20 years in Arkansas, Rockefeller hosted more than 200 conferences and meetings at his home at Winrock Farms. Many of these conferences, attended by state and national leaders, hammered out solutions for Arkansas’ most difficult crises.

“Rockefeller addressed issues such as water quality, rural economic development and education. He explored how to build Arkansas and improve race relations. He also held training for farmers. Rockefeller’s conferences provided a necessary spark to improve public and private-sector policymaking. Rockefeller’s legacy continues to shape events at the Rockefeller Institute. … By integrating the resources and expertise of a statewide university system with the legacy and ideas of Gov. Rockefeller, this educational institute and conference center creates an atmosphere where collaboration and change can thrive.”

Areas of emphasis include economic development, archeology (in cooperation with the Arkansas Archeological Survey), the arts, the culinary arts, the environment, health and wellness and public affairs.

Arkansas needs a place such as the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute, a secluded spot where we can gather to examine our past, debate our current problems and design our future. I can’t help but believe WR would be proud of what has become of the ranch he called home for almost two decades.