Bauxite, Timber, and the Resource Extraction Economy

In eighteen eighty-seven, a deposit of reddish ore was discovered near Little Rock, and a second large deposit was identified in Saline County, southwest of the city. Geologists confirmed what prospectors suspected: it was bauxite, the raw material from which aluminum is refined. The deposit turned out to be one of the largest in North America, and the small town that grew up around it took the straightforward name of Bauxite.

For the first half of the twentieth century, Arkansas produced the majority of United States bauxite output. During the Second World War, when aluminum was critical to aircraft production, the mines ran around the clock. The industry eventually declined as cheaper deposits were developed overseas, but for decades the mines defined the economy of the Saline County area.

Timber had been transforming Arkansas even longer. The Ouachita Mountains and the Ozarks held vast stands of shortleaf pine and hardwood, and from the eighteen-eighties onward, out-of-state lumber companies swept through the state in a systematic harvest that stripped millions of acres in a generation. The companies built their own railroads to reach the timber, established company towns in the hills, and employed tens of thousands of workers.

When the merchantable timber was gone, they moved on, leaving cutover land that was either abandoned or converted to agriculture. The environmental and social consequences lasted for decades. What replaced the virgin timber was second-growth forest, still substantial, still the basis of a significant paper and wood products industry, but never quite the same.

Arkansas today produces large quantities of rice, soybeans, poultry, and natural gas in addition to its timber. But the pattern of resource extraction, wealth taken out rather than invested in, shaped the state's development for most of its history and left a complex legacy that Arkansas communities are still working through.