Burdette: A Lumber Company's Town in the Delta Swamp

Before the Three States Lumber Company arrived in nineteen oh five, the land around Burdette was swamp. The company completed a large sawmill in nineteen oh six, drained the wetlands, and built a railroad spur, the Blytheville, Burdette and Mississippi River Railway, to haul logs north. They named the town for Alfred Burdette Wolverton, one of the first lumbermen to settle in the area.

Within seventeen years, the company had logged out everything worth cutting, then sold the cleared land to farmers. By nineteen twenty, Burdette Township had more than nine hundred residents working the newly revealed cotton soil. The Burdette Plantation grew up alongside the mill, and the Burdette School Complex, now on the National Register of Historic Places, stands as the main reminder of the brief, intensive burst of industry that turned a cypress swamp into farmland.