Planting a seed

Endangered building in De Valls Bluff getting a new lease on life.

Driving through small towns in Arkansas, one can often see businesses that are boarded up, falling down or missing from a row of buildings and leaving a gap on Main Street.

The Robinson Building in DeValls Bluff is among those derelict spaces. It anchors the last vestiges of a business district in the White River town in Prairie County. In 2022, Preserve Arkansas listed it as one of Arkansas’ Most Endangered Places.

Constructed in 1913, the building housed Elias Brooks Robinson’s mercantile. When he fell ill, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, he turned over the business to his wife, Hester Buck Robinson (1896-1963), and she apparently had a head for business.

At her death, she owned 15,075 acres, according to the encyclopedia’s entry about her (see arkansasonline.com/130hester).

She managed the mercantile and farmland, was a director of the Prairie County Bank at Hazen and the Planters Bank & Trust Co. banks at Forrest City and DeValls Bluff. She was a stockholder of the Farmers and Merchants Bank at Clarendon, vice president of the DeValls Bluff consolidated school board and vice-president of Biscoe Gin Co.

Today, the Robinson Building is merely a brick shell, and the rest of the buildings in the row stand unused and in various states of decay.

In announcing the 2022 list of Endangered Places, Preserve Arkansas’ executive director Rachel Patton noted that it wasn’t an exhaustive list but it illustrated broader trends around the state, including changes in population distribution that will require new development models in rural areas.

Martin Smith is founder of the nonprofit StudioDRIFT, which owns the Robinson Building. Smith designed the organization to help create a new model for development in the area while helping small towns and their historic buildings.

Smith wants to use the Robinson Building to bring business back to the town. His larger plan, which includes several small towns in the Arkansas Delta, is called The Delta Grown Hub Network. DeValls Bluff would be the second phase of the network, after the town of Wynne.

Smith says the gutted brick building has been stabilized.

“We’ve got masons and we’ve rebuilt structurally. We’ve got a structural engineer looking at giving us some options of what to do to tie it back together. We put in our own money from our firm. We’re kind of subsidizing,” he says about his own business, Ecological Design Group. “We knew we needed to get it stabilized.”

The very basics of the nonprofit’s plan are to create market gardens in the community and use buildings in a variety of ways, including to sell Delta Grown produce and house a cafe (serving local produce) as well as teaching kitchens and processing facilities. Martin hopes such hubs will provide economic development and food security to Delta towns that are food deserts — even though they are in agricultural areas.

“We call it just planting a seed, making sure it will grow and making sure that the community feels like they have ownership in it,” he says.

To find out more about the Delta Grown Hub Network plan for DeValls Bluff business district, visit studiodriftar.org. To learn more about Arkansas’ Most Endangered Places visit