Pictured above: State, local and company officials broke ground on the first Big River Steel mill. (Photos provided)
Arkansas is an emerging hot spot for major industry, and communities across the state are taking advantage, such as the oil and soon-to-be lithium wells of El Dorado, the steel mills of Mississippi County, the aerospace hub in East Camden and the growth at the Port of Little Rock.
Mississippi County
The Great River Economic Development Foundation bears the slogan “Cotton to Steel,” an apt description of Mississippi County’s industrial history.
“Mississippi County was at one time, in 1938, the second-most populous county in Arkansas behind Pulaski,” said Clif Chitwood, president. “It had 88,000 people, and it probably had 60,000 mules because that’s what it took to make a crop here. This county was originally a giant hardwood forest, like most of the Delta from here to New Orleans.
Clif Chitwood
“First came the pioneers, like [Robert E. Lee] Wilson in the late 1800s, who at one point owned 80,000 acres in the county. He cleared the timber and put in dozens of sawmills, and then they would float the timber down to Memphis or have tugboats pull it up the river to St. Louis and Chicago. When all the trees were cut, they brought in enough dynamite to fight a respectable war and started blowing stumps.”
Once the land had been properly cleared, thousands of workers were brought in under the sharecropping system, which raised Mississippi County to that status as the second most populous county in Arkansas.
The first manufacturers came to the county in the 1950s, making up for farm jobs lost to mechanized agriculture. Nucor Corp., currently the largest steel producer in the country, opened its first steel mill on the Mississippi River in 1988. There was an agricultural downturn at the time, and workers who were experienced in being around and maintaining agricultural machines provided an excellent workforce for the new plant. Nucor found the county so ideal that it opened a second steel mill roughly a decade later.
At the same time, however, there were major problems. The county’s first manufacturer, a textile-producer Crompton-Shenandoah, left in 1985 after some 30 years in the area, and the Eaker Air Force Base shut down in 1991. Between those and other closures, roughly 16,500 jobs were lost in a county of about 60,000 people. Many were forced to find work elsewhere.
“Osceola and Blytheville are both county seats, and that had led to a kind of Friday night football rivalry, which at times got more serious than that,” Chitwood said. “It came to the point where, if one town was recruiting a factory, the people in the other town would rather see it go to another state entirely. In ‘97, the leadership of both communities, as well as the towns of Manila and Wilson, brought together the Great River Economic Development Foundation. They said, ‘Let’s have one recruiter, one recruitment agency, and spread before the industries as large a buffet as we can.’”
Clif Chitwood, president of the Great River Economic Development Foundation, said county officials worked together to attract companies like U.S. Steel.
Since then, GREDF has expended more than $77 million in county funds, matched by more than $300 million in state funds through the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, with a payoff of $7 billion-plus worth of private investment, 7,000 jobs and the impressive distinction of being the second-highest steel producing county in the United States. With U.S. Steel’s new $3.2 billion project currently under construction, Mississippi County is set to become America’s No. 1 steel-producing county.
GREDF has not limited its recruitment efforts to steel alone. Factories brought in by its efforts produce items that include margarine, air conditioners, cars, soft drinks and plastics. The county is also home to aviation repair technologies at the former air base and strives to support and expand local small businesses.
When advertising the county to industries, the most obvious quality Chitwood highlights is its position on the Mississippi River, one of the country’s most important shipping routes. As crucial as that feature is, however, it’s hardly a unique one, so the county has made numerous efforts to make itself more appealing as a place to do business. In recent years, there has been a shift from simply trying to get more jobs to making Mississippi County a better place to live. One such effort is the “Work Here, Live Here” program.
“We go to the companies that we have helped with investment needs, and we ask them to consider a contribution to the Grow Mississippi County Foundation, which offsets up to 10 percent of the price of a new house for their employee if that employee stays with the company for four years,” Chitwood said.
Education, likewise, is vital for both businesses and quality of life, and Mississippi County works closely with its educational institutions to improve scores and opportunities for students. Notably, the county is home to Arkansas Northeastern College in Blytheville, which has the highest average graduating salaries of any school in the state, including the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.
However, attracting new industries takes more than just an attractive spot. It takes an active, well-prepared recruitment agency to get the word out. GREDF advertises in magazines for professional site selectors, visits trade shows and works alongside AEDC to find recruitment opportunities.
“When the state advertises, we try to be a good partner with them,” Chitwood said. “They’ll ask us to send a request for information, which can be anywhere from a single page to 15 pages, wanting everything from the water pressure to the gas pressure to how quick your firemen can be there. A site selector’s primary job isn’t to pick a site; it’s to eliminate sites, so if they asked for the RFI on Friday and they want it by Monday, they’re eliminating people who don’t already have the information or are not willing to work all weekend to get it — and I will say, in the early years, we worked a lot of weekends, but now we have the information, and we keep up with it. We can respond to almost any request within 48 hours, and we made a promise that we would never not respond to a RFI from the state, a site consultant or company.”
Camden-East Camden
A major but often overlooked industry in Arkansas is aerospace and defense, which represents the state’s No. 1 export by value, ahead of agriculture. Though aerospace is spread across the state, Camden and East Camden represent the undisputed center of Arkansas’ defense industry.
“[The place] where the aerospace and defense industry is located was originally built in 1945 by the U.S. government as the Shumaker Naval Ammunition Depot, just across the Ouachita County line from Camden and primarily in Calhoun County,” said James Lee Silliman, executive director of the Ouachita Partnership for Economic Development. “It was built for the war effort to be the leading rocket manufacturing complex for the U.S. Navy.”
James Lee Silliman
The Shumaker Naval Depot continued operations until 1959, when it was declared government surplus and then auctioned off in 1961. Most of the manufacturing assets were purchased by what is now Highland Industrial Park. The property has since developed into the largest industrial park in a five-state area and retained its original purpose as a defense hub. The park is home to some of the most important names in the defense industry, including Aerojet Rocketdyne, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and the German-based Rheinmetall. It’s this history that Silliman credits as the most important factor in drawing businesses to Camden.
“It’s a culture that we’ve had since 1945,” Silliman said. “It’s a mindset, a culture and an industrial base that our area is used to. Because of that, we have the storage capacity and a trained, quality workforce, and that attracts other companies to look at investment in the area.”
Most of the industry growth for Camden comes not from new businesses coming to the area, but from the expansion of existing industries, which OPED works closely with the state to promote and support. The past five years have seen significant growth in the aerospace and defense industries, with recent expansions and new investments by several of the companies in the park. Given current geopolitical realities, these companies are very active in terms of new contracts.
Lockheed Martin, shown from the inside and out, anchors the largest industrial park in a five-state area.
“Whenever a company is looking to expand its operations, there’s various incentive programs that the state will make available, and it’s all tied to the amount of investment and job creation,” Silliman said. “We obviously don’t have the resources that the state of Arkansas does to use locally, but we pattern a lot of our local incentives along similar lines of jobs created and amount of investment.
Lockheed Martin, shown from the inside and out, anchors the largest industrial park in a five-state area.
“We try to work with the local two-year college, Southern Arkansas University Tech, to develop workforce programs, and the college does very well at sitting down and working with area industries on their needs for workforce training and curriculum. We can also do a property-tax abatement depending on the amount of investment. The acronym for it is PILOT, which stands for ‘payment in lieu of taxes,’ where you can structure a financing package at a reduced property tax rate for these companies.”
El Dorado
When the founder of El Dorado, Matthew Rainey, named the new settlement after the fabled city of gold, he likely had no idea how close he was to being right: the town was sitting on top of a massive reserve of black gold and would become the center of Arkansas’s 1920s oil boom.
Ever since, El Dorado has had a thriving industry extracting the region’s extensive mineral wealth.
Bill Luther.
“It was in 1921 when [the first oil well] came in,” said Bill Luther, president and CEO of the El Dorado-Union County Chamber of Commerce. “In the first months, the size of El Dorado doubled. Interestingly, in the ‘20s, there were also a lot of geological surveys being done by the government, and they identified that the brine coming out of these oil fields had high concentrations of bromine and concentrations of lithium.”
In the 1950s, the oil industry was joined by the Great Lakes Solutions plant, which began extracting bromine from the brine. That plant was later purchased by LANXESS, a German-based chemical company that is now partnering with Standard Lithium on its direct lithium extract plant, which is expected to begin operations in 2026.
German chemical company LANXESS is partnering with Standard Lithium to extract lithium in south Arkansas. (Photos provided)
These extraction efforts are complemented by Union County’s extensive chemical-processing industry. LSB Industries produces various industrial and agricultural products such as ammonium nitrate for fertilizer and concentrated acids. Continental Carbonic Products has built a facility to capture carbon dioxide from LSB’s facility to compress into dry ice. In addition, El Dorado is home to a major hazardous waste incineration plant which has undergone numerous expansions in the past two decades, the most recent of which doubled the plant’s capacity.
“The longevity of employees here, I would have to say, was definitely a deciding point for LANXESS to purchase [the plant]. We have guys who’ve been here for 30, 35, 40 years, and we have one guy that’s been here for 50 years,” said Mark Day, public relations and land manager at LANXESS. “That’s a lot of knowledge. You want people to be invested in a company and not have a lot of high turnover. People are here, they’re here to stay, and they enjoy what they do and the people they do it with.”
In addition, the Roseburg El Dorado Medium Density Fiberboard Mill produces wood products.
“El Dorado is an industrial town. This gives us the advantage of multiple contractors, suppliers and vendors for all our business needs without having to reach into larger cities,” said Levi Winfrey, plant manager. “Arkansas also has a great process for training grants, and we have utilized these multiple times for leadership and maintenance training at our facility.”
The biggest industry news in Arkansas currently relates to developments in the lithium industry. ExxonMobil announced its intention to begin drilling new wells in southern Arkansas, while Standard Lithium will have its job made substantially easier by working with LANXESS, because all of the necessary infrastructure is already in place, brine wells included. Once lithium extraction begins, the county will also make an excellent location for small lithium-ion battery plants, having both a stable electrical grid and sustainable water pipeline to keep such operations running.
Another draw the chamber touts to industry recruits is its education system, especially the El Dorado Promise. Established by the Murphy Oil Corp. in 2006, the Promise provides graduates of the El Dorado school system with a five-year scholarship based on the highest tuition of an Arkansas public institution. Some 3,000 students have been assisted by the scholarship so far.
“We have South Arkansas Community College, which is very open to providing whatever industry training is needed,” Luther said. “High school students can concurrently take classes from South Arkansas College beginning in their junior year, spend an additional six months upon high school graduation and earn a process technology certificate. Those graduates start at $85,000 a year.”
Like Mississippi County, El Dorado has worked hard to improve its standard of living — and been successful in doing so.
Downtown El Dorado has flourished as industry brings new residents.
“It’s one of those places where, when new people come, they are absolutely amazed at what’s going on,” Luther said. “We have a vibrant downtown square. Our Main Street group has received all kinds of awards. We have the Murphy Arts District, which has the First Financial Music Hall and a huge outdoor stage with something going on almost weekly.”
The chamber is active in recruiting new industries, frequently sending out letters and making contacts with companies that might be suited to the area. Luther recounted a story from 2020, in which he noticed that an individual from Whataburger had looked at his LinkedIn profile. He called the phone number on the man’s profile to let him know that El Dorado would love to have a Whataburger in town and invited him to come visit for a tour. The man responded that the company might be interested after the COVID-19 pandemic had passed. A year later, Luther was contacted by Whataburger and connected the company with a local property owner, and the city is now home to its very own Whataburger location.
Port of Little Rock
The success of the Port of Little Rock can in many ways be seen as proof of the old adage: “location, location, location.” As a hub of logistics, there is little about it that could be more ideal. Not only are river barges one of the cheapest forms of transport, but the port is located conveniently in the center of the state, next to its largest center of business and seat of government, with easy interstate access for trucks and to the nearby Clinton National Airport for air cargo needs. That said, this location, however advantageous, is only half of the success story.
The Port of Little Rock offers advantageous rail, river and highway connections.
The Arkansas River is a different beast from what it was a century ago. In 1927, a major flood in which the Arkansas, Mississippi and White rivers converged led Congress to exert better control over the nation’s inland river system.
“My father told me about growing up in downtown Little Rock, and the river would dry up in the summer,” said Bryan Day, executive director of the Little Rock Port Authority. “They’d go down in the river and hunt for mussels and crawdads. Then in the spring and the fall, it would flood out of the banks and flooded neighborhoods over North Little Rock, so the Army Corps of Engineers came up with this plan to put 18 locks and dams on the river from the Mississippi to Tulsa, [Okla.], to keep it like this, so there’s always water in the river to be able to load a barge to nine feet below the water surface.”
Bryan Day
While that was underway, Little Rock and other cities along the river decided to create ports, with the Port of Little Rock being established on paper in 1959. It was not until 1971, however, that a proper dock was completed and the first business, AFCO Steel, came to the port. Today, the port is home to 52 businesses from six countries that employ more than 10,000 people from 45 counties across Arkansas.
“Some of those companies you’ve probably heard of — every jar of Skippy peanut butter sold in America and Canada is made here at the Port of Little Rock,” Day said. “TY Garments, a Chinese company making Adidas sportswear for a German brand; Lexicon, which is local; and AFCO Steel, which did a lot of work for the Dallas Cowboys stadium and the San Francisco Giants stadium. Amazon has a 4 million-square-foot distribution center here, which at one time was the latest and greatest in terms of technology and logistical movement. The Trex Co. has a half-billion-dollar manufacturing facility under construction here, and there’s half a dozen other great stories, but those 50-plus businesses are what makes us thrive.”
The Port of Little Rock offers advantageous rail, river and highway connections.
All of the businesses are located on a sprawling 5,000-acre site that has been steadily growing over the past decade. There are currently several open plots available that range in size from 6.7 acres to 150 acres. The Port Authority is working to create a 1,000-acre megasite to help entice a multi-billion dollar project to the area, much like the BlueOval Ford plant in Tennessee. Such a massive project would bring dozens of supporting companies with it, many of which would reside not just at the port, but across central Arkansas, benefitting the entire region.
“We looked at many ports in the southern region before making the final investment decision, but Little Rock has the accessibility of river navigation and Class 1 railroad connection, which is unmatched,” said Mihir Desai, supply chain executive at port tenant Welspun Tubular, an Indian conglomerate that produces pipes, textiles, steel and more. “The port offers enormous infrastructure to handle our requirements in both unloading barges and rail car shipment. Also, the port provides the flexibility of working extra days or hours based on business needs, which helps in project execution.”
The Port of Little Rock offers advantageous rail, river and highway connections.
The Little Rock Port Authority receives no public funding. Instead, it pays the bills solely through fees, the buying and selling of land, loading and unloading barges and rail cars, and other services. Any revenue earned beyond expenditures is reinvested back into the port, whether it be buying new land, improving the port’s infrastructure or getting the word out to potential industry recruits.
The Port Authority frequents trade shows and closely collaborates with the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce, state agencies and private businesses, and those connections can be extremely impactful. The Amazon distribution center, for example, did not come to Little Rock because the Port Authority reached out to them, but because Amazon contacted a local real-estate agent to ask about available plots of land.
“When a prospect finally calls and says, ‘We’re interested in Little Rock. Can we come visit?’ then we pull out all the stops,” Day said. We get all the utilities at the table, we get the mayor at the table, we get the chamber, and we have a really candid conversation: Here’s what we can offer, here’s what sets us apart. We’re business-friendly, we’re relationship-driven, and we’re going to continue to support you if you choose to locate here.”
Lexicon CEO Patrick Schueck said in addition to the obvious benefits of proximity to interstates, rail and barge, the port offers a valuable community relationship with other businesses and the Port Authority.
“We have never had a request to the Port Authority that went unanswered, and we have forged close ties with many of our fellow port businesses,” he said. “The location also allows for easier commutes for those coming in from outside the county. We have several other plant locations, and without a shadow of a doubt, our Port of Little Rock location offers more amenities, better logistics and easier commutes than any of our other locations.”
