Arkansas

Like the U.S. Post Office and Federal Building (LT29), Union Station straddles the state line, which passes through a classical facade featuring three tall, round-arched openings separated by Corinthian pilasters. Above the cornice, a florid stone circular frame (lacking its original timepiece) is a composition reminiscent of New York City’s Grand Central Station, a suitable image to terminate the long urban axis north to the post office. The station was built to consolidate the operations of four railroads that served Texarkana in the late 1920s.

State Line Avenue’s passage into the central business district is marked by the limestone federal building, which is situated on an oval traffic island located between 5th and 6th streets. The monumental south facade, consisting of a three-story Ionic colonnade and a monolithic attic and penthouse that rise in two stages above the entablature, terminates the view from the south along State Line Avenue. A tall first-story podium with rusticated joints supports three floors modulated by shallow pilasters with simple Tuscan-like capitals.

The decision to build a second courthouse for Arkansas County was a result of Stuttgart’s dramatic growth in the early twentieth century as the agricultural (rice being the principal crop), transportation, and business center of the county. The courthouse in DeWitt, the initial county seat, was replaced in 1931–1932 by a building designed by H. Ray Burks in a rather severe Art Deco style. Stuttgart’s courthouse, designed by J. B. Barrett for the local contracting firm of Barrett and Ogletree, is a Classical Revival two-story red brick structure on a raised basement.

Arkansas’s first rice mill, the Stuttgart Rice Milling Company, was built in Stuttgart in 1907 on the site of the present-day Riceland Foods complex. The rice industry thrived until the rice market crashed in 1920, when rice sold for thirty cents a bushel instead of the expected three dollars. The farmers’ solution was to band together to market their crops, and they formed the Arkansas Rice Growers Cooperative Association in September 1921. After leasing properties to mill their rice in 1928, the association purchased the Stuttgart Rice Mill and expanded to Jonesboro.

Stuttgart’s City Hall occupies a building that was the town’s post office until the postal service moved to a new building in 2002. Constructed of red brick, the one-story Colonial Revival building has a classical portico of four limestone columns and a pediment outlined with dentils. Limestone is used for the sills, lintel, and keystones of the rectangular windows and for the swag decoration above them. The design suits the building’s adopted civic function well, giving a time-honored classical face to city business.

This attractive building accommodated the office, warehouse, cold storage, and packing areas of an ice company; it is a building type of which few survive. The Spanish Colonial Revival building is constructed of brick and plastered on the exterior, and the pilasters framing the ends of the facade are topped with ball finials. An awning shelters the door and windows, and above it is the building’s name in large letters. Alternating white and brown glazed bricks line the cornice, and this is topped by a horizontal green tile band and a green tile roof.

Located in the heart of a rice-growing region, the Rice Research and Extension Center (RREC) and the adjacent Dale Bumpers National Rice Research Center (AR6) form the largest resource for research in rice production in the United States. This area, which is known as the Grand Prairie, has an impervious clay soil that can hold water on the surface for several days at a time, making it ideal for rice cultivation.

The 57,000-square-foot state-of-the-art U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) facility was completed in 1998, with the addition of two greenhouses in 1999 and 2000. The center is named for former U.S. senator from Arkansas Dale Bumpers. This is a much larger building than the RREC (AR5), having a massive curved front with a recessed glass entrance. As in the RREC building, a barrel vaulted hall runs the length of the building.