Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas

Little Rock (Pulaski County) suffered its seventy-first consecutive rainless day. The devastating Flood of 1927, financial upheaval from the 1929 stock market crash, and killer tornadoes preceded the drought that struck Arkansas in the spring of 1930. Rainfall during June and July 1930 was the lowest on record. July temperatures, typically in the nineties, reached 107 degrees. August temperatures peaked at 113 degrees with successive 110-degree days. Arkansas’s worst drought of the twentieth century took place during this in 1930–1931. Twenty-three states across the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys and into the mid-Atlantic region were caught in its grip. The severest drought centered upon eight Southern states, with Arkansas sixteen percent worse than the other states based on weather statistics.