HEART

From page B2

on the cover of the 1984 edition of this special section.

We honor our farmers and our farming heritage. Many of the streets, subdivisions and buildings in this area are named after some of these farmers from days gone by, so even as progress takes its long, slow but never-ending stroll across the fields of this county and paves over the ground that has produced cotton, corn, rice and more for generations, we’ll at least have a reminder of the families and the farmers that have played a pivotal role in growing not only crops, but a community and its people.

Farming has changed a lot over the years. Margaret Woolfolk’s awesome book “A History of Crittenden County, Arkansas” is a great testament to that. I happen to own a copy. The Marion Library (named, fittingly enough, after Ms.

Woolfolk) has a few too, if you’d like to read it.

The whole volume is just an amazing look at how we got from a swampy piece of land that was part of a Spanish land grant to where we are today (well, where we were in 1991 when the book was published).

There’s a lot to read, but there’s a whole section devoted exclusively to agriculture, including cotton being hand-picked and a photo of the Thompson Cotton Gin in West Memphis, the city’s first gin. According to the book, in 1982, of the 389,184 acres that make up Crittenden County, 371,634 of them were made up of farmland.

While that number has decreased dramatically (and allowed for exponential growth in thecounty’s population in those 38 years), there are still thousands and thousands of acres being planted every year.

There’s too much history to include here, but the one takeaway Woolfolk’s book want to instill in the reader is that since the early 1800s when the swamps were drained, farming was, and I would argue remains, the backbone of Crittenden County.

Today, the mule and

See HEART, page B4

Photos courtesy of Spence & Jenni Held HEART

From page B2

plow have been replaced by the tractor. The combine has largely taken over for the team of cotton pickers with their sacks. You can program a harvester with a GPS navigation system that almost doesn’t even need a driver in the seat.

The levees protect the fields from seasonal flooding and high-tech irrigation systems keep crops watered when the temperamental seasonal rains refuse to fall.

But still, at the heart of Crittenden County is farming. And at the heart of farming is the farmer.

And in the heart of every farmer is his family.

This year, Spence and Jenni Held are being honored as the 2021 Crittenden County Farm Family of the Year. As you’ll read in these pages, the helds are Crittenden County through and through, doing their part to keep that heart of Crittenden County beating for years to come.