Delta Dawning

Faded company town finds new life.

BY DWAIN HEBDA

Wilson, Arkansas, population about 1,000, sits on the broad shoulders of Mississippi County.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE LAWRENCE GROUP Norbert Mede was born and raised on the West Coast, where he spent years in a multifaceted career of hospitality, hotel management and tourism development in the San Francisco Bay area. A year ago, he gave it all up for an opportunity to help shepherd a rebirth in Wilson, Arkansas, to be part of a comeback story as sturdy and green as the cotton and soybeans sprouting out of rich Arkansas Delta dirt.

“I saw a lot of potential regionally in this area,” Mede said to explain the lure from the coast. “The steel mills, the tourism potential is tremendous. There’s a lot of unsung, unmarketed assets in this area as well up and down this U.S. Highway 61 corridor we can leverage to make this a very sought-after area to live, work and visit.”

Mede is a unicorn in these parts, as far more people, talent and opportunity have exited the Delta than have arrived of late. He’s a textbook specimen of the kind of reverse exodus that small towns and rural communities pine for, but on which few have cracked the code, either for tourists or those seeking a forever home.

Still, that’s exactly why Mede, vice president of operations for The Lawrence Group and a stranger in a strange land, is here — to turn Delta clay and loam into eager guests and new residents.

“Something I get all the time is, ‘Why Wilson? Why is this town unique?’” Mede said. “I think there is a treasure trove of history in Wilson, the uniqueness of having an original company town and that whole concept. We definitely have that in our back pocket. We have a very interesting story.”

In some ways, Wilson is exactly like a hundred other rural dots on the Arkansas map, a place where the lifeblood of the people pumps perennially through the verdant fields surrounding the roughly 900-resident hamlet. Looked at through one lens, Wilson has a lot of the same “used tos” of other places: There used to be a public school here, there used to be this small business or that one, there used to be more people.

But in ways equally compelling, Wilson is very different from its peers. It was founded in 1886 as a company town, a community owned lock, stock, barrel and mule by Lee Wilson & Company as a means of attracting and retaining labor. Over time, Wilson’s

Life in Wilson emanates from the cool green space of the town square (below), to include the Delta School (upper right), indoor and outdoor dining and The Grange at Wilson Gardens (bottom), home of the town’s Farmers Market.

legal definition changed, the town incorporated, residents owned property and taxes helped pay for things. Still, the Wilson family remained a powerful civic and political force until the company sold to The Lawrence Group in 2010.

“I’m the first mayor that’s not from the Wilson family or an employee of the family. All of them were Wilson family members until the previous mayor, and he was an employee,” said Mayor Becton Bell, a fifth-generation Mississippi County farmer who took over the town’s top spot in 2013. “People didn’t know the difference between Lee Wilson & Company and the City of Wilson. I mean, you paid your water bills at the Lee Wilson & Company office made out to the City of Wilson. There was a lot of confusion there about who was what.”

Whether The Lawrence Group was primarily interested in Lee Wilson & Company for the town or the ground — thousands of acres of fertile farmland, at that — is unclear. But CEO Gaylen Lawrence Jr. soon showed a desire to restore and promote the community to the tune of millions of dollars of infrastructure, renovation of the walkable downtown (as originally built in English Tudor architecture) and establishment of the private Delta School.

Great effort and expense have also gone toward developing tourism assets, both inherent — the town sits near Hampson Archeological Museum State Park housing an outstanding collection of Native American artifacts — and additive, such as the boutique Hotel Louie, coming online in 2021. Still other attractions are a combination of the old and new; the excellent Wilson Cafe was shut down when The Lawrence Group bought it and today is both a foodie destination for its upscale twists on Southern favorites and a bell cow for the town’s gastro-tourism events.

“We are an emerging leader in culinary and wine experiences,” said Cyndi Detty, The Lawrence Group’s director of marketing. “We have an amazing cafe, and I use the word cafe, but it’s not your standard cafe. The food is extremely high end, it’s beautifully prepared. With that, we host wine tasting opportunities, we do wine dinners several times a year. We do experiences where you have the opportunity to do a chef table which is right off the kitchen.”

The cafe is a clear vision statement for Wilson’s rebirth, tied as it is into various facets of the economic ecosystem. Local is king here; not just from produce and flower growers sourcing the cafe, but by the stores that line the town square and even more so by those that don’t.

“One thing that you will notice when you come to visit is we do not have any type of chain business,” Detty said. “Everything is locally owned and we do that purposely. You don’t find McDonald’s here; you won’t find a Hampton Inn here.”

“Our niche is people looking for an experience, something a little different than going to a larger city and having all of that. This is a place where people who come to stay at our hotel park their car on a Friday and don’t get back into it until they leave on Sunday because they’ll walk everywhere. They’ll go down to the marketplace, they’ll go into some of the stores. It’s that small-town charm that makes us so unique.”

The desire to stay true to ethos often straddles the line between traditional and modern. The antique shotgun houses renovated as Airbnbs are a good example of the blending of the times, while expanding high-speed internet speaks directly to quality of place and attracting new residents.

Development and revival are seen through the same proximal lens, resulting in a highly-walkable city center that is easy to maneuver and where everything feels within arm’s reach without congestion. Norbert Mede said his laundry list of reimagined community projects, including the old high school gym as a community center and workout space and the defunct movie theater brought into state-of-the-art glory, will fill holes in that still exist in this landscape.

But some lines, he said, the town shouldn’t and won’t cross.

“I think what is always in the vernacular when we talk about projects is, is this truly authentic?” he said. “We don’t want to build things that aren’t necessarily appropriate. We don’t want to put a roller coaster in or an animal park or something. We want to build community first and tourism comes right after that because we need livable services as much as we need visitor services.

“I’ve always been a huge proponent of small-town America and bringing that back, but economic vitality needs to be a part of that, too. Wilson fell into disrepair after its heyday, and now we have the opportunity to be a part of a true renaissance revitalization. It’s very exciting.”