Business and Economics

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Entry Category: Business and Economics - Starting with C

Caddo River Lumber Company

Caddo River Lumber Company was one of the largest lumber companies operating in the Ouachita Mountains during the first half of the twentieth century. During the Depression, it may have been the largest manufacturing employer in the state. However, like many other lumber companies of the era, it succumbed to a shortsighted policy of non-sustainable practices. The Caddo River Lumber Company was organized in 1906 by Thomas Whitaker Rosborough, M. R. Smith, W. E. Cooper, and Lee Wilson of Kansas City, Missouri, with Smith as president and Rosborough as vice president, though the latter managed the operations of the company. Rosborough had previously operated sawmills and a planing mill in Arkansas and Louisiana and had done some work for Ozan …

Cairo and Fulton Railroad

Today’s Union Pacific Railroad line from the Missouri state line through Little Rock (Pulaski County) to Texarkana (Miller County) was constructed by the Cairo and Fulton Railroad. Over a period of more than 100 years, the Cairo and Fulton merged first into the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern (StLIM&S), then into the Missouri Pacific, and finally into today’s Union Pacific. As the first railroad to connect Arkansas to Missouri and the eastern United States, the Cairo and Fulton opened up the state for development. The Cairo and Fulton Railroad was chartered by the Arkansas General Assembly on January 12, 1853, to build a railroad line from the Arkansas-Missouri state line across Arkansas to Texas, including one or more branches …

Camark Pottery

Founded in 1926, Camden Art Tile and Pottery Company was the third and last producer of Art Pottery in Arkansas. By the end of its first year, its name had changed to Camark to include both the city of Camden (Ouachita County) and the state of Arkansas. Camark Pottery eventually became one of Camden’s best-known industries and was known nationwide. Samuel Jacob “Jack” Carnes, a native of Zanesville, Ohio, and an engineer with knowledge of the pottery business, wished to access the regional pottery market, so he created the company with several Ohio associates, including businessmen and artists. They held a competition among twenty-five cities for its placement. Camden won the appointment in 1926. At this time, Camden was booming. …

Capital Hotel

The Capital Hotel in Little Rock (Pulaski County), situated near Arkansas’s first state capitol building (now known as the Old State House), has been part of the city’s history since 1872. Once the most luxurious hotel in the state, it often served as an unofficial political headquarters, where decisions, as well as political careers, were made. In 1974, the hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Built near the river port, the Denckla Block, as it was first known, was built to house offices, shops, and gentlemen’s apartments for businessmen. In the second half of the nineteenth century, after the end of the Civil War, Little Rock was a growing river port and rail station. There was …

Carnes, Jack

aka: Samuel Jacob Carnes
Samuel Jacob (Jack) Carnes was the founder and owner of Camark Pottery, one of Arkansas’s premier art pottery companies. Camark pottery has become highly valuable to collectors and is featured in museums such as the Old Statehouse Museum and the Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Jack Carnes was born on March 12, 1896, in Zanesville, Ohio, the son of John O. Carnes, a lawyer. His mother’s name is unknown. He had one sister, Hazel, and one brother, Craig. He grew up in Cambridge, Ohio, and graduated from Cambridge High School in 1915. He received his BS degree from Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio, on June 4, 1918, and did graduate work in engineering at the Massachusetts …

Carpenter’s Produce

Carpenter’s Produce is an agricultural enterprise based in Grady (Lincoln County) that supplies produce for both regional farmers’ markets and national grocery chains such as Walmart and Kroger. The Carpenter family has long been an important symbol of African-American success in the field of agriculture, especially in a time and place when many independent black farmers faced monumental difficulties in remaining solvent. Carpenter’s Produce was established by Abraham Carpenter Sr. and his wife, Katie. In 1969, Katie Carpenter planted a one-acre vegetable garden and began selling her produce locally. At the time, Abraham Carpenter, then almost forty years old, was working at Seagram’s Lumber Mill in nearby Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). Using some of his earnings, he purchased thirty additional …

Catfish Industry

aka: Ictalurus punctatus
The catfish industry is the largest component of aquaculture in the United States and a significant industry in Arkansas. Arkansas is the birthplace of the commercial catfish industry, with at least two farms selling catfish in the late 1950s. Arkansas farmers began to replace buffalofish (Ictiobus spp.) with catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) in the 1960s. By 1966, Arkansas had 4,500 acres in catfish production and three processing plants. However, increases in the price of fishmeal (an ingredient used in making fish feeds), an economic recession, and the lack of year-round production technology resulted in an industry downturn in the mid-1970s. Multiple-batch production technologies developed in the 1980s allowed for year-round supplies to processing plants. Catfish are raised in ten- to twenty-acre earthen …

Cavender’s All-Purpose Greek Seasoning

Lester “Spike” Cavender of Harrison (Boone County) created Cavender’s All-Purpose Greek Seasoning with his son Ronald Stephen Cavender in the late 1960s. It was adapted from a recipe by a Greek friend of Cavender’s who was a chef. For many years, the seasoning was shared only with their friends and family until they began selling it in 1969. Since 1978, Cavender’s All Purpose Greek Seasoning has been manufactured and sold by the S-C Seasoning Company, Inc. In May 1988, the company moved from its original location to a larger facility in Harrison. By 2015, a third generation of the Cavender family was producing and selling their world-famous Greek seasoning. Lester Robert “Spike” Cavender was born in Cooper, Delta County, Texas, …

Chateau Aux Arc Vineyards and Winery

One of several new vineyards in Arkansas, Chateau Aux Arc of Altus (Franklin County) promotes itself as the largest planter of Cynthiana grapes in the world as well as the largest planter of Chardonnay grapes in the United States outside of California. Chateau Aux Arc is named for the French term meaning “at the bend,” which is generally believed to be the origin of the name “Ozark.” The winery is owned and operated by Audrey House, who started it in 2001 at the age of twenty-five. House was born in Oklahoma in 1976 but lived in Little Rock (Pulaski County) from 1989 to 1994; she graduated from Pulaski Academy. She then studied psychology at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, …

Cherry, Lewis Williamson

Lewis Williamson Cherry was an important businessman in Little Rock (Pulaski County) who founded several enterprises and served in a leadership role in various banks, as well as managing a robust real estate business. Lewis W. Cherry was born on November 22, 1858, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Calvin Washington Cherry and Sarah Blount Williamson Cherry. His father, a banker, was son of Daniel Cherry, a wealthy North Carolina–born land speculator in early nineteenth-century Tennessee who founded Cherryville in Haywood County. After an initial education in Memphis public schools, Lewis W. Cherry was educated at a number of private schools in Tennessee and Kentucky, completing his education at James Byars’s academy in Covington, Tennessee. Cherry began his career as bookkeeper for …

Chewaukla Mineral Springs Co.

The cold-water springs below the site of the bottling factory of Chewaukla Mineral Springs Co. (later the Sleepy Hollow Water Co.) outside Hot Springs (Garland County) became a national sensation, with backers from Chicago and an “expert” touting their “radioactive medicinal value.” Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians wrote a song dedicated to this “Sleepy Water of Hot Springs, Arkansas.” Radio programs and newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune disseminated testimonials of what the water could cure. The bottling factory was located on what is now Sleepy Valley Road off of Highway 7 South just north of Hot Springs proper and within Hot Springs National Park. In the twenty-first century, the remains of the facility are not marked by any …

Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway

The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad (commonly called the Rock Island) was an Illinois railroad that gained access to Arkansas in 1902. Its purchase of the Choctaw, Oklahoma and Gulf Railroad gave it the beginnings of a transcontinental route along the thirty-fifth parallel and the beginnings of a route to the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans. Ultimately, the railroad would purchase more than thirty-two separate railroads to create a network in Arkansas that was more than 700 miles long, with railroad lines in the Mississippi River Delta and the Arkansas Grand Prairie representing the importance of agricultural products to its business. Oil from southern Arkansas, coal from western Arkansas, and lumber products from central and southern Arkansas were …

Chicken War of 1962–1963

The Chicken War of 1962–1963 was a trade dispute between poultry producers in Arkansas and other states and the European Economic Community (EEC). In the late 1950s, Arkansas poultry producers began to market U.S. chicken in western Europe. In collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, M. H. “Bill” Simmons of Plus Poultry in Siloam Springs (Benton County) and other business leaders helped post–World War II Europeans develop their own poultry industry. Noting that Arkansas’s Benton County produced more chicken than some European nations, Simmons assumed it would be decades before European producers could compete with their American mentors. “There is a considerable movement of poultry from Northwest Arkansas into the export channels almost weekly,” Simmons wrote to U.S. Senator …

Clarke, Faye

Faye Clarke co-founded the Educate the Children Foundation, which was created to support rural and impoverished school districts with donations of books and other educational materials. She was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 2002. Faye Wilma Robinson was born on August 6, 1931, in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) to Jerimah and Eariest Robinson. In high school, she was an Arkansas National Merit Scholar and went on to study at Hampton Institute in Virginia. After graduation, she attended a one-year program in businesses at Radcliffe College taught by professors of the Harvard Business School, where women were not yet allowed; she was the first African-American woman in this program. She began working at Aramark, a company that …