PFEIFFER COUNTRY REVIEW

I was given a copy of Pfeiffer Country as a Christmas gift by my longtime office manager, Brenda Brown. Brenda, as you know, has a connection to a later generation of the Pfeiffer family.

I recently retired from the highway construction business after 44+ years. During that time we worked in Arkansas a lot. Much of our work was in Clay County and I know the area very well.

Places that you mentioned in your book had a special meaning for me because we’ve built roads and bridges there. To name a few there is Piggott, Pollard, McDougal, Boydsville (upper and lower), Rector, Leonard, Crockett, Knob, Hickoria, Corning, Trinnon, and Nimmons. In addition there was your special reference to Big Slough Ditch and Mr. Pfeiffer’s involvement. By my count we have built 6 new bridges on Big Slough all the way from Piggott to the Leonard Road.

Piggott is a little town I’ve always liked and I’ve been by the Pfeiffer House, but I’ve not toured it. Because of your wonderful book I have it on my list of things to do.

Best wishes,

Jay Githens

J. W. Githens Company

Poplar Bluff, MO

Filed under: PFEIFFER COUNTRY: THE TENANT FARMS AND BUSINESS ACTIVITIES OF PAUL PFEIFFER IN CLAY COUNTY, ARKANSAS 1902-1954

Review of PFEIFFER COUNTRY in the “Journal of Southern History” by Linda English, University of Texas-Pan American

Pfeiffer Country: The Tenant Farms and Business Activities of Paul Pfeiffer in Clay County, Arkansas: 1902-1954. By Sherry Laymon. (Little Rock, Ark.: Butler Center Books, 2009. Pp. 239. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-98008977-6; cloth, $37.95, ISBN 978-0-9800897-6-9.)

As the title suggests, Sherry Laymon’s book focuses on the farm enterprises of Paul Pfeiffer, a wealthy midwesterner who began purchasing land primarily for cotton production in the swampy bottomlands of Arkansas’s northeastern Clay County in 1902. Pfeiffer ultimately amassed enormous wealth and acreage before selling off–under favorable terms–a majority of his landholdings to his tenant farmers in the early 1940s. This last act, combined with his benevolent management style, bolsters Laymon’s argument that Pfeiffer offered his farmers a kinder, gentler model for landlord-tenant relations, in contrast to the conditions experienced by sharecroppers and tenants in the Arkansas Delta specifically and the South generally. By extension, Laymon’s study challenges the conventional depiction of sharecroppers’ being subject to virtual bondage by ruthless landowners through crop liens and debt peonage.

In creating an agricultural utopia composed of “good farmers who seldom moved from their farms,” Paul Pfeiffer not only “avoided conflicts with tenants that other large planters encountered” but also managed to withstand the turbulent economic cycles of the early twentieth century (p. 13). Laymon provides ample evidence of Pfeiffer’s generous approach to farm management. For example, the landowner opted not to operate a commissary wherein his tenants would be forced to purchase staple items from him and be subject to exorbitant interest rates. He supplied a substantial two-story farmhouse to each of his tenants, supplemented by a series of outbuildings, including assorted barns and a chicken house. Pfeiffer provided general upkeep of his tenants’ properties, including drainage, an expensive but necessary task. Further, Pfeiffer allowed his tenants to allot a portion of their acreage to their own material needs, wooded areas for firewood, and an acre for home gardens.

All told, conditions in “Pfeiffer Country” seemed better than elsewhere for the average tenant farmer; still, there are some glaring issues that go largely unexplored in this analysis. The author posits Pfeiffer’s Clay County against the conditions of other sharecropping counties in the Arkansas Delta, mentioning only in brief that Clay was an all-white county and that the landowner advertised for “good white people … who believe in education, morality, and the better things of life” (p. 72). Pfeiffer preferred to recruit his tenants from the Midwest, after which these industrious folk needed to prove their mettle to him during their probationary first year. Obvious questions of class dynamics emerge between the ultra-rich Pfeiffers–who traveled in elite circles and whose eldest daughter married Ernest Hemingway–and their tenants (hinted at by Laymon’s assertion that the Pfeiffer women saw the local people as quite different from themselves).

The author does, however, provide a thorough examination of Pfeiffer’s business records and family correspondence. The firsthand accounts of Clay County tenants provide invaluable insights into early-twentieth-century rural life. While informative, the detailed descriptions of farm dwellings seem cumbersome and poorly integrated into the narrative. Paul Pfeiffer is a compelling figure who made a calculated business decision to not treat his tenants as serfs. However, to avoid hagiography, Laymon needs to rely less on her good-evil dichotomy and place Pfeiffer in the complicated, nuanced world in which he lived.

LINDA ENGLISH

University of Texas-Pan American

Filed under: PFEIFFER COUNTRY: THE TENANT FARMS AND BUSINESS ACTIVITIES OF PAUL PFEIFFER IN CLAY COUNTY, ARKANSAS 1902-1954

Gregory Hansen’s Review published in “Journal of Folklore Research”

Studies of tenant farming within the Arkansas Delta have 
focused mainly on the labor activism associated with the 
Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the sharecropping 
systems of the southeastern region of the state. Social 
histories of the state reveal how the system supported 
inequitable and oppressive labor relations that continue 
to contribute to the region's legacy of poverty. Labor union 
activities of the 1930s and 40s, in particular, provide an 
inspiring story that Studies of tenant farming within the 
Arkansas Delta have focused mainly on the labor activism 
associated with the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and 
the sharecropping systems of the southeastern region of the 
state. Social histories of the state reveal how the system 
supported inequitable and oppressive labor relations that 
continue to contribute to the region’s legacy of poverty. Labor 
union activities of the 1930s and 40s, in particular, provide 
an inspiring story that is preserved in scholarship and in a 
museum located in Tyronza, Arkansas, where the union was 
originally based. The preservation and interpretation of this 
history contributes to our understanding of America’s regional 
history, especially in relation to agriculture, labor, and race 
relations. Sherry Laymon’s book adds to our understanding of 
tenant farming by looking at agricultural history in a region of 
northeastern Arkansas. Her study of Paul Pfeiffer’s farming 
operations opens up a more richly-nuanced understanding of 
Arkansas’s social history. Integrating oral history and studies 
of vernacular architecture into her study, Laymon shows that 
the sharecropper/tenant farming system was not necessarily an 
exploitive 
system. 

Laymon’s study centers on the life of Iowa businessman, Paul Pfeiffer, and his contributions to developing the area around Piggott, Arkansas. Pfeiffer moved from Iowa to St. Louis, eventually settling in this small town near the Missouri border in 1913. Pfeiffer came from a family of economic means. While he was opening up the area for cotton cultivation, his brothers were laying the foundation for a drug company that eventually became Pfeiffer Pharmaceuticals. Paul and Mary Pfeiffer lived in Piggot for the remainder of their lives, and they remained important entrepreneurs and civic leaders within the mid-south region. One of their daughters, Pauline Pfeiffer, went on to become a journalist, and she is remembered, today, as the second wife of Ernest Hemingway. The famous American writer, himself, spent much of his time in Piggott in the 1930s, and the Pfeiffer home is preserved today as a museum and interpretive center, complete with a redecorated presentation of Hemingway’s study. The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center graciously allowed Laymon to use oral histories, museum holdings, and archival information for her research.

Laymon’s book provides a fine overview of the Pfeiffer family’s activities in this northeastern Arkansas community. She uses a variety of sources to give the context for the Pfeiffers’ move to Piggott, and makes fine use of oral histories of current residents who rented land or worked for the family. Laymon then gives us an overview of the vernacular architecture associated with what have become known as “Pfeiffer Farms” within the Piggott community, and she analyzes the buildings in relation to regional styles of architecture and the agricultural system used by Pfeiffer. Laymon’s study convincingly shows that Pfeiffer blended together two economic systems to create an innovative, even benevolent, model for farming in the Arkansas Delta. Pfeiffer blended practices from real estate development with the tenant farming system to establish profitable farmsteads that contributed to his family’s fortune while also allowing his tenants opportunities for economic advancement. Unlike other planters, Pfeiffer eschewed highly exploitive practices, such as creating an economic hegemony through operation of commissaries and patrols, and instead displayed a benevolence to his tenants by renegotiating—and sometimes even forgiving—loans. Laymon backs her conclusions about these socially responsible practices through thorough written documentation, and she also presents numerous stories of the Pfeiffers’ largesse throughout her narrative. She also shows that Paul Pfeiffer’s unique blending of tenant farming with real estate development did, in fact, allow many renters to eventually purchase their own farms.

What emerges in Pfeiffer’s system is a blending of the ideal of the midwestern family farm with southern sharecropping. This hybrid system is clearly evident in Laymon’s intriguing presentation of vernacular architecture. Although few Pfeiffer farms stand intact today, Laymon was able to create her own renderings based on recollections and sketches of older sites from local residents. Her illustrations show how the influence of predominantly midwestern styles of vernacular architecture often blended with southern building styles to create a unique impact on the region’s cultural landscape. One especially intriguing example of this process is her rich discussion of a regional adaptation of the shotgun house. Whereas most shotgun homes feature an asymmetrical façade with only one window on the gabled end, the Pfeiffer shotgun featured a central doorway flanked by two windows. This style does show up throughout the area, and it appealed to the aesthetic values of Pfeiffer when he hired builders to construct these homes. Through her analysis of the shotgun houses and other styles of homes, barns, and outbuildings, Laymon demonstrates how individual influences and regional adaptations are essential components of a localized vernacular style of architecture.

Pfeiffer Country is an important contribution to regional history, and Laymon’s blending of oral history with analysis of vernacular architecture will provide excellent methods for future studies. The book could benefit from a more thorough application of ideas from scholarship within these areas, and there also is an implicit dichotomy between “savage” and “civilized” that reveals itself in inopportune times throughout the book. This tension, however, feels more anachronistic than offensive, and Laymon gives us an excellent contribution for understanding Pfeiffer’s farms in relation to wider patterns of history and culture within the Arkansas Delta in particular, and southern social history in general.

Gregory Hansen
Professor of Folklore and English
Arkansas State University

Filed under: PFEIFFER COUNTRY: THE TENANT FARMS AND BUSINESS ACTIVITIES OF PAUL PFEIFFER IN CLAY COUNTY, ARKANSAS 1902-1954

PFEIFFER COUNTRY review and comments

Thank you for publishing your dissertation as a book. I found it fascinating since I have been working on a family history project for about three years now. Your book filled in a lot of the “reasons why.” The census records can give you names, dates, places and numbers: all facts, but they can not give you why someone moved or what they might have thought about while doing it. The stories that you tell and explain in your book about Paul Pfieffer dovetails, exactly with my family history, since my great-grandparents were Bynum Washington and Teula Wells. You’ve listed them on page 232 (of the hard cover printing) in the December, 1940 list of buyers, as B.W. and Teula Wells.

I have several family photographs, showing the interior and the exterior of the old farm house that they bought from Paul Pfeiffer. It looked just like the one you illustrated on page 95. The barn you illustrated on page 107 is still standing, although it is not in very good condition at this point. My grandfather’s brother inherited the farm, and they lived in the house until 1968 or so. Then they tore it down to build the new house. The barn and some of the other outbuildings are still there, though.

Gregory A. Crouch

Filed under: PFEIFFER COUNTRY: THE TENANT FARMS AND BUSINESS ACTIVITIES OF PAUL PFEIFFER IN CLAY COUNTY, ARKANSAS 1902-1954

John M. Giggle’s Review of PFEIFFER COUNTRY: THE TENANT FARMS AND BUSINESS ACTIVITIES OF PAUL PFEIFFER IN CLAY COUNTY, ARKANSAS 1902-1954

Every southern county holds tight to its history. Secrets, rumors, successes, and scandals lie hidden behind the vault of history, either fast fading from public memory or continually shifting in popular representation with the steady passage of time. For decades the history of Clay County in northeastern Arkansas, a corner of the state’s Delta region, has lay hidden and in need of its own interpreter. Its stories of entrepreneurial landowners, innovative farming, and remarkable heroism during the Great Depression sat untold. But no longer. Sherry Laymon unlocks the past of this fascinating corner of the South through a meticulous sifting through manuscripts, diaries, census records, architectural diagrams, and newspaper accounts.

Focusing on the first half of the twentieth century, Laymon argues that Paul Pfeiffer, son of German immigrants and Mid-western businessman, dominated the modern settling of Clay County. Shortly after falling in love with the area while touring it by rail in the late 1800s, he purchased tens of thousands of acres, hired crews to clear and drain them, and recruited farmers to plant and harvest cotton. What makes Pfeiffer’s exploits so unusual, as Laymon demonstrates, was his ability to create a local culture unlike most found in the South. Unlike his peers, Pfeiffer offered tenant farmers and sharecroppers ample plots of land, generous terms of credit, large well built homes, and up to one acre each to plant subsidiary crops. Mules and horses were readily available. Less sanguinely, he participated in efforts to block African Americans from immigrating to this part of the Delta, as was the case in the region as a whole. Still, he never became the conniving, rapacious landowner so common during this era of the New South, one who encoiled his workers in a downward spiral of debt and dependency that doomed them to lives as members of a permanent property-less class. Indeed, during the Great Depression, he freely allowed his workers to suspend loan payments and gave away supplies and food. More unusual, he eventually sold his land holdings at rock bottom prices to his workers, affording them rare access to land and the opportunity to join the ranks of stakeholders.

Richly researched and expertly written, Pfeiffer Country offers unusual access to the Southern past. Painstakingly searching through the documentary paper trail left by Pfeiffer himself, Laymon brings to life a little glimpsed version of history in which society evolved under the strong hand of a leader committed to sharing his bounty and good fortune with his fellow white citizens. It stands as a useful reminder that southern counties have distinctive trajectories and should not be viewed through any universal prism of interpretation.

John M. Giggle

Assistant Professor of History and African-American Studies

University of Alabama

Filed under: PFEIFFER COUNTRY: THE TENANT FARMS AND BUSINESS ACTIVITIES OF PAUL PFEIFFER IN CLAY COUNTY, ARKANSAS 1902-1954

Clyde A Milner II’s Foreword to PFEIFFER COUNTRY: THE TENANT FARMS AND BUSINESS ACTIVITIES OF PAUL PFEIFFER IN CLAY COUNTRY, ARKANSAS 1902-1954

The history of agriculture in the American South seems oversupplied with stories of tragedy and failure. In Arkansas, numerous families recall hard times of poverty and displacement, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the “Great Depopulation” of the countryside that accelerated during the 1950s. In northeast Arkansas’s Clay County, one man, Paul Pfeiffer, took a different approach to the development of the land he owned and toward the tenant families who worked his fields. He often provided two-story homes, large barns, corn cribs, and other buildings at a single farmstead. He wanted his tenants to succeed and planned to sell them the land they worked at an accommodating price with reasonable financial arrangements. Pfeiffer did not try to trap his farmers in a cycle of endless debt and unremitting exploitation. Surprisingly his most active decade for these enlightened policies, 1925 to 1935, coincided with some of the worst years for American agriculture in the twentieth century. One hundred twenty-nine farm families worked for him during this time, and he did not alter his benevolent philosophy as the national economy spiraled downward.

Sherry Laymon applies her multiple talents as a scholar, writer, and artist in examining Paul Pfeiffer and his contributions to Clay County. She knows the old buildings, especially the houses and barns, that Pfeiffer placed on his farms. With the aid of former tenants, she has sketched these structures and recreated their floor plans. She also has examined the financial records of Pfeiffer’s enterprises and found a remarkable story of business acumen and humane generosity in hundreds of warranty deeds, sales documents, and other transactions. She has done numerous interviews, read dusty newspapers, and compiled statistical evidence. Most tellingly, she knows the story of this land and how it became a place for extensive farming only after its swamps were drained and its timber cut. Paul Pfeiffer accelerated this process when he began purchasing Clay County acreage in 1902. Here was a midwestern businessman, fresh from St. Louis, who saw the possibilities of raising crops on previously untilled soil. A new man in a new place looking for economic opportunity, he had not come to some far western locale, but to the northern reach of the Mississippi Delta. After a few years, he brought his wife, Mary, and their children to the small town of Piggott. They had relocated to a remote, underdeveloped region down river from St. Louis that for some could still be called a frontier.

One daughter, Pauline, only lived in Piggott for two years before going off to college in 1915. She corresponded often with her mother and when Pauline lived in Paris later on, she became Ernest Hemingway’s second wife. The famous American author regularly visited the Pfeiffer home in Piggott. Throughout the 1930s, Hemingway spent many weeks with his in-laws. Local families remember these sojourns, but their occasional sightings of the great writer have not obscured their even brighter memories of his father-in-law. Paul Pfeiffer did not join Hemingway for hunting trips out west and only fished with him once off the Florida Keys. By remaining in Piggott during the depths of the Great Depression, Pfeiffer’s generous acts helped numerous individuals in these hardest of times. For example, one story has him hiring men to paint his home time and time again to provide some form of useful work. The layers of paint uncovered in the later restoration of the family home as a museum indicates the truth of this legend.

Sherry Laymon well understands both Paul Pfeiffer and Clay County where he remains so well respected. When a scholar of Laymon’s ability looks so closely at a life, the results do not always match the public reputation. Yet after her examinations, Paul Pfeiffer remains a good man who did many good deeds. This excellent study is an appropriate recognition of a very fine life. Readers will benefit greatly from learning about Paul Pfeiffer and his vision for improving one part of Arkansas in the first half of the twentieth century.

Clyde A. Milner II

Arkansas State University

Filed under: PFEIFFER COUNTRY: THE TENANT FARMS AND BUSINESS ACTIVITIES OF PAUL PFEIFFER IN CLAY COUNTY, ARKANSAS 1902-1954

Gary William Jones’ Review of PFEIFFER COUNTRY: THE TENANT FARMS AND BUSINESS OPERATIONS OF PAUL PFEIFFER IN CLAY COUNTY, ARKANSAS 1902-1954

“PFEIFFER COUNTRY is a great read and instant “must have” book for those of us with an interest in Arkansas cultural and heritage tourism in general and the history of NorthEAST Arkansas in particular. Plenty of “research rigor”,
footnotes, and statistics to satisfy the hardcore historians and academics (you know who you are 🙂 and loads of anecdotes for those of us fellow-travelers who just like good stories and vernacular history.

Who knew, for example, that one can fluff up heirloom quilts by putting them out in the sun? Or what about lighting cornstalk fires under recalcitrant mules to get them moving? All useful information from PFEIFFER COUNTRY.

Congratulations upon a successful publishing debut. Look forward to your
forthcoming books.”

Gary William Jones
Little Rock, AR

Filed under: PFEIFFER COUNTRY: THE TENANT FARMS AND BUSINESS ACTIVITIES OF PAUL PFEIFFER IN CLAY COUNTY, ARKANSAS 1902-1954

PFEIFFER COUNTRY: THE TENANT FARMS AND BUSINESS ACTIVITIES OF PAUL PFEIFFER IN CLAY COUNTY, ARKANSAS 1902-1954

Pfeiffer Country is a non-fiction examination of a southern Twentieth Century tenant farming operation in which the farmers actually prospered. Contrary to most tenant farm operators in the Mississippi Delta, Paul Pfeiffer–Ernest Hemingway’s father-in-law, ran a profitable tenant system during the most trying years of the Depression. Laymon’s research and interviews with former Pfeiffer tenants provide many rich and refreshing details about a successful counter-model farming operation that greatlycontrasted similar systems in the Mississippi Delta.

Filed under: PFEIFFER COUNTRY: THE TENANT FARMS AND BUSINESS ACTIVITIES OF PAUL PFEIFFER IN CLAY COUNTY, ARKANSAS 1902-1954, agriculture, American history, clay county arkansas, farming, Mississippi Delta, pfeiffer country, rural, sherry laymon, social history, South