E. A. Wright brought his family to the Bayou DeView area of Woodruff county around 1871. Escaping waves of carpet-baggers and home-grown scalawags which had earlier driven him from North Carolina to Tennessee, E. A. finally found solace in the raw frontier of Eastern Arkansas, which had been barely settled some twenty years before. This former C. S. A. infantryman and prisoner of war, lived out the rest of his life in simple peace, scraping out an existence from the tough, root-bound and malaria-ridden swamps. He and his neighbors who often also shared a similar refuge heritage, flourished in a fellowship grounded in the basics of hard work, perseverance, and Jesus. Over the next thirty or so years remaining to E. A., several communities within the Bayou DeView area came into existence to provide livelihoods, spouses, and homes for his children, grand children, and their many descendants. With glacier-like certainty however, the economy eventually changed, and though E. A.’s “large and useful family” spread itself all over the country, the old communities and culture from which they sprang eventually became extinct -- taken over by the efficient, automated practices of large-scale agribusiness concerns. Any physical trace that an E. A. Wright lived out his life in this place, like the surrounding towns, farms, and homes, has now been effectively erased from view for the most part. All that remains is the dust from the fields, worn-out and broken gravestones, and a few faded photographs. Severe and immutable images of E. A. with those large farmer hands of his sturdily attached to the soil that provided his sustenance, passively float before us with eyes glaring the horror of a war long ago, beckon us to answer the question of his existence like the Sphinx. This is an attempt to reconstruct that history of his family and associated families which had come into being within this area of Arkansas with his arrival.
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This page created on 04/11/2000 22:43. Updated 06/22/2003 15:42.