Pfeiffer Country
The Tenant Farms and Business Activities of Paul Pfeiffer in Clay County, Arkansas, 1902-1954
Sherry Laymon

Northeast Arkansas is transformed by tenant farmers and lumbermen

“Readers will benefit from this excellent examination of a visionary Arkansan, a man whose vision improved one part of Arkansas in the first half of the Twentieth Century.”
—Clyde A. Milner II, Arkansas State University

Clay County, Arkansas, was a flatland with little improvements at the outset of the twentieth century. Into this primitive society came a St. Louis entrepreneur with a liking for agriculture. Paul Pfeiffer bought large tracts of land, set up tenant farmers, and reigned for nearly fifty years as a beneficent landlord. Laymon records the gratitude of many a family who remember with appreciation loans made to acquire equipment. When farming was interrupted by the coming of the railroad, both Pfeiffer and his tenants adapted to a lumbering economy—so long as the hardwood forest lasted. Interestingly, Laymon’s account includes the fate of tenants following the break-up of “Pfeiffer Country.”

Sherry Laymon received her PhD in heritage studies at Arkansas State University, has taught at Ouachita Baptist University, and is now at work on her third book on Arkansas history.

October
6 x 9, 224 pages, 49 photographs, 4 maps
$19.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-9800897-7-6 | 0-9800897-7-8
$37.95 hardcover
ISBN 978-0-9800897-6-9 | 0-9800897-6-X

Distributed for the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies