OP/ED: Leaving Arkansas

Leaving Arkansas
By Rex Nelson
This article was published today at 3:02 a.m.

What's now the Arkansas Economic Development Commission is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. The agency is serving a state far different from the one that existed in 1955.

Desperate to do something about massive out-migration, the Arkansas Legislature passed a bill that year creating the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. Though it was given very little money, the commission was tasked with bringing new industries to the state, expanding existing industries and upgrading the standard of living.

For years, Arkansans had been leaving the farm to find work in automobile factories in Detroit and shoe factories in St. Louis. In the Delta, thousands of sharecroppers and tenant farmers were out of work due to the rapid mechanization of agriculture. The exodus, however, wasn't limited to the Delta. In the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains, the Arkansas River Valley and the Gulf Coastal Plain, people also packed up and headed out.

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"Unfortunately, good land soon ran out, leaving many of the state's rural areas overpopulated in relation to arable soil," Holley wrote. "The earliest out-migration, beginning in the 1890s, was in part a response to this fundamental problem. Population losses continued in the first two decades of the 20th Century. In the 1920s, Arkansas lost almost 200,000 people, a record high to that point. Migration slowed slightly during the depressed 1930s, but by the 1940s, when the national economy shifted to war production, the migration stream that had previously been a steady leak turned into a torrential flood. Arkansas, in fact, lost population in every decade between 1890 and 1970."

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Holley wrote that the magazine's headline had asked "a valid question, and the answer was easy--the lack of well-paying jobs. Arkansas' most significant export was not lumber, cotton or bauxite, but people." Stemming that tide was the first task for Rockefeller and the AIDC six decades ago.

http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2015/jun/10/leaving-arkansas-20150610/
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Very interesting article from today's paper. It may be behind a paywall, so sorry in advance if you cannot read the entire article.