Keiser: Lee Wilson's Timber Railroad Stop

In the late eighteen hundreds, northeast Arkansas was swampland dotted with hardwood forest. The entrepreneur Lee Wilson built a business empire by draining the swamps, harvesting the timber, and farming what was left. Keiser began as a logging outpost and a stop on the rail line connecting his operations to Jonesboro.

The town was named for John Keiser, one of Wilson's associates. The first general store was reportedly set up in a boxcar. Keiser Supply and a Lee Wilson and Company cotton gin followed.

When the trees were gone, the cotton came. Mississippi County, which includes Keiser, was long one of the state's great cotton counties. Today the area still farms cotton, corn, and soybeans on land that a generation of lumbermen first had to pull out from under standing water.