Louisiana Techniques Used In Early Arkansas Rice Fields
Swannee Bennett
Director of Historic Arkansas Museum
In February of 1819 famed English naturalist Thomas Nuttall documented the earliest known reference to the production of rice in Arkansas. While visiting the old French village of Arkansas Post, located along the Arkansas River, a few miles above its confluence with the Mississippi River, Nuttall commented that “rice has been tried on a small scale [here], and found to answer every expectation.” Rice was certainly a part of the local cuisine in early Arkansas, with local merchants like Van Buren’s Messrs.
However, the farming of rice in what would become the United States began more than a century before Nuttall’s visit to Arkansas. The tidal marshes of coastal South Carolina would become home to the first rice farms in this country. During the last decade of the seventeenth century, rice seed was brought from West Africa along with large numbers of enslaved people who were experienced in its cultivation. Moving westward through Georgia then Louisiana, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the overwhelming number of rice farms were located in natural or flood prone areas containing clay based soils that would hold moisture.