April 13, 2010

In the early 1900s, William H. Fuller convinced Lonoke County farmers to give him $1,000 if he could successfully produce thirty-five bushels of rice per acre on a seventy-acre farm. His success in 1904 is considered by many to be the advent of commercial rice production in Arkansas. Fuller’s success and further development of the crop are also evidenced some forty years later by the long line of trucks shown here loaded with rice in Carlisle (Lonoke County) not far from where that first crop was grown.