Blytheville: From Circuit Rider's Post Office to B Fifty-Two Base to Empty Runway

Blytheville began in eighteen seventy-nine when Henry T. Blythe, a Methodist circuit rider, established a post office. By eighteen eighty-nine the town was incorporated, and the flat farmland around it made it one of the richest cotton-producing corridors in the South.

Then came the war. The Blytheville Army Air Field activated on June tenth, nineteen forty-two, training pilots on Beechcraft planes to fly North American B Twenty-Five Mitchell bombers. The base closed after the war, reopened in nineteen fifty-nine as a Strategic Air Command posting for B Fifty-Two bombers, and was renamed Eaker Air Force Base in nineteen eighty-eight for General Ira Eaker, who commanded the Eighth Air Force in Europe.

Then the Cold War ended. The base topped the Pentagon's closure list in nineteen ninety-one and shut down on December fifteenth, nineteen ninety-two. Nearly six thousand military personnel left.

The county lost more than five thousand residents over the next decade. The old runways became an industrial park, and Blytheville has spent thirty years rebuilding around an absence.