Establishment Dyess Colony was established in Mississippi County in 1934 as part of the
New Deal efforts of
Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide economic relief to destitute workers in the
Great Depression. The experiment was the largest such community-building experiment established by the federal government during these years. The project was established by Mississippi politician and
cotton planter William R. Dyess (1890–1936), director of the Arkansas Emergency Relief Administration, who initially sought the establishment of a self-supporting agricultural community housing 800 families upon unused
Mississippi Delta farmland. Director Dyess established the entity remembered to history as "Dyess Colony" and as "Colonization Project No. 1", plans for which were submitted to chief of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA)
Harry Hopkins early in 1934. The project was approved by Hopkins in March 1934. The site consisted primarily of swamp and cutover forest land, although containing deep topsoil deposited by the
Mississippi River, part of what was then the most productive cotton farming county in the entire United States. The project's scope was immediately scaled back to 500 family parcels, with the participants to be recruited from Arkansas
sharecroppers and tenant farmers from across the entire state. Thousands of applicants were carefully screened, and eligibility requirements included being an experienced farmer made destitute through no fault of his own and being an Arkansas resident "of good moral background" in good health, under the age of 50, and white. Funds for the purchase of land were provided by FERA in the form of a grant to the Arkansas Emergency Relief Administration, which initially managed the project. Subsequently, a new entity was established known as Dyess Colony Inc., the stock of which was held in trust by the
US Secretary of Agriculture, and management and control passed over to the managing board of that company. The main purpose of the town's administration was to give poor white families a chance to start over with land that they could work toward owning. The original township included 500 individually owned and operated farms which were 20 or 40 acres each.
Early administrative structure The colony was carefully planned and administered by Dyess and a board of directors, who managed the day-to-day activities of the colonists. A turnover of this top leadership took place on January 14, 1936, however, when Dyess and his top lieutenant, chief accountant and finance director Robert H. McNair Jr., were killed in an airplane crash returning to Arkansas from Washington, DC. After his death, leadership of the Dyess Colony passed to
Little Rock attorney and Arkansas Department of Labor statistician Floyd Sharp, a personal friend of Dyess, and Lawrence Westbrook, a
Texas rancher who had been recruited by Harry Hopkins to work at FERA. Westbrook was fired by Hopkins in 1937 for a highly absentee work ethic and for attempting to imperially micromanage the colony's affairs from his desk in Washington. Two
cooperative associations were incorporated by the board of directors of Dyess Colony Inc. — a consumer cooperative which operated a colony store and other businesses and a producer cooperative which coordinated the processing and sale of cotton farmed by residents of the colony. The colony also launched its own cooperative
credit union not later than 1938. In an effort to avoid additional capricious action, a new legal entity called the Dyess Rural Rehabilitation Corporation (DRRC) was established, to which Dyess Colony Inc. sold its assets. This succeeded in saving the non-profit colony until the DRRC was absorbed by the
Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1944. The federal aspect of the project was formally terminated in 1951. ==Geography==