Sam Walton, Don Tyson, and J.B. Hunt: The Northwest Arkansas Corridor
Near Fayetteville, Arkansas
The stretch of highway between Fayetteville and Bentonville, roughly thirty miles of Ozark foothills along US Seventy-One, quietly became one of the most economically consequential corridors in the United States. Three companies headquartered in this small cluster of northwest Arkansas towns reshaped how Americans eat, what they buy, and how it all gets moved, and all three were built within a few years of each other, by men who knew each other. Sam Walton opened the first Wal-Mart Discount City on July second, nineteen sixty-two, in Rogers, Arkansas, about fifteen miles north of Fayetteville.
He had been running Ben Franklin variety stores in Bentonville since nineteen fifty and had spent years refining a theory: a discount retail store could succeed in a small town if it kept costs low enough and stock broad enough. His competitors thought the idea would not work in rural markets. By nineteen seventy-seven, the chain had one hundred ninety stores.
By nineteen eighty-five, eight hundred. John Tyson had arrived in Springdale in nineteen thirty-one with a battered truck and, as the company history puts it, a nickel in his pocket. He began hauling chickens to Kansas City and St.
Louis, developed an in-transit feeding system to allow longer hauls, and built a business around vertical integration of the poultry industry. Tyson Foods was formally incorporated in nineteen forty-seven and went public in nineteen sixty-three. Don Tyson took over after his parents were killed in a train crossing accident in nineteen sixty-seven and expanded the company aggressively.
J.B. Hunt launched his trucking operation out of Lowell in nineteen sixty-nine with five tractors and seven trailers.
By nineteen eighty-nine he had introduced intermodal container shipping, truck trailers loaded onto railcars, helping to transform freight logistics nationally. By nineteen ninety-two, the company topped one billion dollars in annual revenue. Three industries.
Thirty miles.
