After spending a Monday night in Bentonville last month, I picked up the Northwest Arkansas edition of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette at breakfast the next morning and was greeted by this headline atop the front page: "Office tower for J.B. Hunt announced. Lowell mayor says move may add 1,500 jobs to area."
The story reported that the Lowell Planning Commission had approved a seven-story addition to the office complex owned by J.B. Hunt Transport Services. The J.B. Hunt facilities manager said the construction project could start as early as July with an expected completion date of early 2017. J.B. Hunt Transport Services, one of the largest transportation companies in the country, employs more than 14,500 people nationwide. Lowell Mayor Eldon Long said, "We truly are developing a skyline next to I-49."
Thus continues the renewed economic boom in Northwest Arkansas, where growth slowed at the onset of the Great Recession in 2007-08. There's no end in sight for the region's current economic expansion. J.B. Hunt, who died following a fall in December 2006, would probably just shrug if he were still around. He's the man who, when asked by a reporter about the secret of his business success, said: "I just haul the freight, and the money rolls in."
Hunt was born the son of sharecroppers in February 1927 in rural Cleburne County. He left school after the seventh grade to work in his uncle's sawmill. Hunt earned $1.50 a day and sold the mill's wood shavings to poultry farmers on the side to be used as ground cover in their chicken coops; in the fall, he'd pick cotton. Hunt joined the Army at age 18 and was recruited for officers' training school. He declined, a decision he later called the biggest mistake of his life because "it was my only real chance to get an education."
In 1949, the sawmill where Hunt worked went broke, leaving him $3,600 in debt. He got a job driving a truck between Texarkana and Fort Smith and paid off the debt. He married Johnelle DeBusk in 1952 and drove a truck for Superior Forwarding Co. of Little Rock. He continued to produce poultry litter and started his own company at Stuttgart in 1961; he lost more than $20,000 the first year. He added a trucking company in 1969 with five trucks and seven trailers. The company had more than 11,000 trucks by the time he stepped down as senior chairman in 2004.
Hunt became friends early on with Sam Walton, and Wal-Mart eventually was Hunt's largest customer. Business really took off after the trucking industry was deregulated in 1980. Hunt took his namesake company public in 1983. He introduced computers to truck drivers in the 1990s and was recognized as one of the world's great innovators in the logistics sector.
Despite his business success, Hunt never forgot his roots. He would carry a wad of $100 bills in a gold money clip and handed out cash to people he thought needed help. Hunt and Walton are gone now, but the county where they based their operations--Benton County--is among the fastest-growing in the country.
Rogers grew from 11,050 residents in 1970 to 55,964 people in 2010. Bentonville grew from 5,508 to 35,301 during that same period. Bentonville is the older of the two towns, having been established in 1837, a few months after the Arkansas Legislature formed Benton County. The county and the city were named for Sen. Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. A town square and 136 lots were laid out initially. During the Civil War, troops moved through Bentonville before and after the Battle of Pea Ridge, burning most of the buildings in a town where loyalties were divided. Bentonville was a center for tobacco production in the 1870s and 1880s, but farmers in the area later switched to apples.
The St. Louis-San Francisco Railway, commonly known as the Frisco, was completed through eastern Benton County in 1881 but bypassed Bentonville. That led to the establishment of Rogers. The first train pulled into Rogers on May 10, 1881. By the 1900 census, Rogers had surpassed Bentonville in size.
"The town, with an estimated population at incorporation of 600 people, was named for Capt. Charles Warrington Rogers, general manager of the Frisco," Gaye Bland wrote for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. "The railroad advertised the Rogers area across the Midwest, and as newcomers from states such as Iowa and Illinois arrived, Rogers began to grow. The town owed its growth to the fact that it was both a local trade center and a major shipping point for apples and apple products. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, orchards surrounded Rogers. Along the railroad tracks were produce houses, apple evaporators where apples were sliced and dried and an enormous apple cider vinegar plant. By the early 1900s, Rogers boasted a brick commercial district, concrete sidewalks, an electric light plant, public schools, a private academy and an opera house."
The county received some national attention when William H. "Coin" Harvey moved there in 1900, developing a resort at Monte Ne and running for president on a third-party ticket in 1932. But no one could have foreseen what J.B. Hunt and Sam Walton would do to change the face of this once-rural county in the northwest corner of the state, a place where the economic good times now roll on and on.
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