Going places: McCaskill, population 96, growing

Photo by Evan Lewis. Mayor Marion Hoosier is overseeing a minor renaissance in McCaskill, Ark.

Originally published in the Texarkana Gazette and on writeforarkansas.org on Jan. 3, 2012.

McCASKILL, Ark.—Adrian Robinson and wife Catherine were en route to San Diego by way of Arkansas in 2006.

Adrian’s sister had offered him some timber—he is a serious woodworker—and the couple had flown to Knoxville, Tenn., and rented a truck to haul it back home to California.

On the way, they stopped in Nashville, Ark., to visit Adrian’s brother, an engineer at Husqvarna. The brother is 12 years Adrian’s junior, and with nine other siblings, almost a stranger.

The Robinsons were already looking for a place to retire, somewhere with a lower cost of living and a sounder state budget than California. During their visit, Catherine decided that the gently rolling hills of Southwest Arkansas were suitable.

Adrian was skeptical, but a few days later, somewhere between Nashville and San Diego, he acquiesced.

The child psychologist and professor landed a teaching position at Cossatot Community College and, in early 2007, arrived in advance of Catherine and began looking for property to settle on.

They found a piece they liked: an idyllic, 36-acre parcel of hardwood with a small pond and a creek running through one end.

“We fell in love with it immediately when we saw it,” Adrian said.

The couple they purchased it from were in the midst of a divorce, and the Robinsons got a good deal.

The land happened to be on the edge of McCaskill, a town they had passed through on several occasions without taking much notice.

“We would drive through McCaskill and think, ‘Who in their right mind would want to live in this place?’” Adrian said.

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McCaskill is a modest cluster of homes and churches bordering the highway between Nashville and Prescott, the type of place that’s gone in a blink.

“When I was a kid growing up, this was a booming little town,” said Lucie Wilson, a lifelong resident and longtime City Council member.

McCaskill was never large, but there used to be several stores, a cotton gin, some produce packing sheds and a railroad spur, Wilson said.

Those all closed as the town’s economy stagnated, then spiraled into a slow decline as older residents died off and younger generations moved away.

The small McCaskill Post Office is the last holdout from better days, but it may soon be empty. It is on the list of outlets the U.S. Postal Service has proposed for closure.

A sense of malaise has hung over the town for years, wafting from long-vacant store fronts and abandoned buildings, neatly summarized in the twin signs that stand sentry on either edge of town: “McCaskill, Population 84.”

But the sign, which can be seen from Mayor Marion Hoosier’s front window, is not entirely accurate.
During the past decade, for the first time in memory, McCaskill grew. Its population, according to the 2010 U.S. Census, is now 96.

Adding a dozen people over 10 years seems unremarkable, but Hoosier prefers to focus on relative growth: 14 percent. That’s one of the highest growth rates for towns in the area and is particularly surprising in a part of the state that has, with a very small handful of exceptions, been losing people at a steady clip.

More surprising is where the growth has come from. Hoosier, sitting at his kitchen table, can name five people living within a few hundred feet who have moved to McCaskill from California in recent years. A few more California transplants live within a couple of miles, as do recent emigres from Detroit, Colorado and Arizona.

Hoosier is not a native McCaskillite, a point made immediately clear by the purple-and-gold Louisiana State University memorabilia hanging on the wall just inside his front door.

“I tell people that our marriage was great until Arkansas joined the SEC,” he jokes.

Hoosier grew up in southern Louisiana and spent much of his adult life in Houston working in the oil industry. He and his wife, Kathy, moved to McCaskill in the mid-1990s to be near her aging parents.

Many of the more recent arrivals like the Robinsons, however, lack close family roots in the area and seem to have wound up in McCaskill more or less accidentally.

Wanda Hendrickson, an artist who lives in a neatly decorated green house two doors from Hoosier, moved from California to be near her daughter who, also a California native, had rented a house in McCaskill several years before after finding a job nearby.

“It’s a different world,” Hendrickson said appreciatively. “Sometimes, I think I’m in a foreign country.”

Kathy and Art Apodaca, who live a couple of miles outside of town, moved from Seaside, Calif., in 2006 after finding a house listed online.

When they visited the house, Kathy said the real estate agent picked a roundabout route that avoided McCaskill for fear that seeing the town would scare them away.

Various reasons are given for relocating to rural Southwest Arkansas: escape from the crush of people filling up California; the relatively unspoiled beauty of its undulating cow pastures and timberland; a sense of community that is lacking in more urban places; a more relaxed pace.

One universal is the low cost of living. Hoosier said he pays about $300 per year in property taxes for his house and 80 acres, a tiny fraction of what he was paying on his home in suburban Houston.

The Apodacas were looking to stretch their retirement savings and, after selling their house and 50-by-75-foot lot just before the housing market crashed, were able to settle on 10 acres in Arkansas with money to spare.

Catherine Robinson thinks Arkansas is fast becoming a destination for California baby boomers seeking an inexpensive, attractive place to retire. She expects that more will pour into McCaskill and surrounding areas.

To locals, the relatively sudden arrival of so many out-ofstaters has been mildly puzzling.

“Of course we wondered,” Wilson shrugs. “But that’s their business, and we stay out of other people’s business.”

Catherine Robinson laughs off the notion that people in McCaskill are above gossip but said that she and her husband were welcomed warmly and without suspicion.

In California, the Robinsons didn’t know neighbors they had lived next to for decades. After five years in McCaskill, they know nearly everyone in town, Catherine said.

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The influx of newcomers has sparked something of a renaissance in McCaskill that reaches beyond population figures.

The town was recently awarded a $208,000 grant to build a community center that will stand beside the first town hall in memory, which will be built using logs donated by the Robinsons.

Plans are also under way to extend the sewer system in Blevins, about 6 miles away, to McCaskill and to install a water tower and fire hydrants that will improve firefighting capabilities and lower homeowners insurance rates.

Momentum has been building for several years, since the town jettisoned its low-quality well system and became part of Nashville Rural Water.

The tipping point came several years later, some time after Hoosier attended a rural development conference in Little Rock and had an epiphany: “Just because we’re 84 people doesn’t mean we can’t do something.”

The Town Council, at Hoosier’s urging, passed a couple of ordinances aimed at dilapidated properties.

After becoming mayor, he also moved to formalize record keeping by asking Catherine Robinson, a former Internal Revenue Service auditor, to serve as the town’s recorder/ treasurer.

Hoosier said his predecessor passed along the town’s existing records in a cardboard box “that a good flat of tomatoes wouldn’t fit in.”

But Hoosier’s vision for McCaskill—that it can become a bedroom community for Nashville and Hope and a destination for retirees—was stalled for lack of money.

The town operates on a $20,000 budget collected from state turnback funds and utility franchise fees. About 90 percent of that is earmarked for garbage collection, street lights and other basics.

To supplement its finances, the town organizes barbecue dinners ($7 per plate) and other fundraisers, but it still operates on a shoestring.

Last year, emergency repairs to the town’s tractor put the budget in the red by $200, Hoosier said.

Things began to fall into place, Hoosier said, when he was cold-called by David Stowers, a projects manager with the Southwest Arkansas Planning & Development District, which helps local governments pursue grants and loans.

Stowers asked what McCaskill needed most. Hoosier proposed a community center that, when plans were drafted, was estimated to cost nearly $1 million.

After being advised that McCaskill was unlikely to receive that much, Hoosier submitted a grant application to the Arkansas Economic Development Commission for $300,000.

Hoosier lobbied hard for the grant, once cornering Gov. Mike Beebe at a local hunting camp to plead McCaskill’s case, and expresses mild consternation that the state funded only two-thirds of the request.

“McCaskill has never asked for anything from the state of Arkansas,” he said. “We’re a 100-year-old town that’s never had nothing from the state.”

Still, Hoosier is grateful for the funding and hopes the community center is just the start.

The town is already working with Blevins to pursue a grant for the sewer system extension, and the recently formed Greater McCaskill Development Council has been developing a long-term strategy for the area.

The council is an accomplished coalition that includes chairman Adrian Robinson, former Diamond Bank chairman John Allen Ross, construction company owner Tom Day and Chief Deputy Mickey Atkinson of Hempstead County Sheriff’s Office, among others.

“The mission is to work to improve the quality of life and safety and health of the citizens of the greater McCaskill area,” Robinson said.

Hoosier said the push for development was initially met with reluctance by some longtime residents.

During the 2010 election, for the first time in recent memory, McCaskill had a contested mayor’s race. Hoosier, who won in a 22-9 landslide, attributes the challenge to longtime residents’ fear of change.

Others on the development council point to record-keeping problems. Catherine Robinson said when she became recorder/treasurer, she found several weeks of unopened mail at the post office.

Hoosier’s opponent, James Ward, has since moved from the city and could not be reached for comment.

The opposition died down as the community center began to seem less like a pipe dream than a reality. Now, nearly the entire community is on board, Hoosier said.

“This can help us grow our town. We believe that,” Hoosier said. “And what’s the purpose of growing the town? To make it a nicer place to live.”

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Lucie Wilson waited outside of McCaskill Volunteer Fire Department the night of Dec. 15, her dark silhouette framed by light from an open door. Hoosier was out of town and Wilson, tasked with presiding over the night’s Town Council meeting, was early.

After a few minutes, Wilson ducked inside and walked between a pair of fire trucks to the spare break room, where the council meets in the absence of the town hall.

The Robinsons arrive soon after, Adrian in a tailored suit with a pink tie and Catherine in a white sweater zipped to her chin. Kathy Apodaca and a friend arrive next.

Apodaca explains that she is attending a party later that night and could only stay for 30 minutes, but she wanted to show the Town Council the inaugural issue of the McCaskill Community Newsletter, scheduled to be mailed in January to all residents.

Wilson checked the time. The council had to pass a resolution formalizing the community center grant, and it was still two members shy of a quorum.

One council seat has been vacant since John Prescott died of cancer in early 2011. Council Member Graylon Brooks was working.

Wilson retrieved her cellphone and called her sister, Martha Brown, to remind her of the meeting and to tell her to go fetch Hendrickson, who wasn’t answering her phone.

The two women walk in a few minutes later, Hendrickson explaining by way of apology that her bird had wiped peanut butter on her shirt, delaying her arrival. Of the seven city officials and spectators at the meeting, four are Californians.

The meeting is brief, and the council approves the previous meeting’s minutes and community center resolution on unanimous votes.

Wilson asks whether the council was going to appoint a replacement for Prescott, who, she noted, probably shouldn’t have been on the council anyways because he had moved outside of the city limits several years before.

Catherine Robinson says the council can make an appointment only if the term would expire in less than a year, then mentions that she might run for the open seat in 2012.

The move would require her to step down as recorder/treasurer.

“You can’t do that!” Hendrickson said in mock indignation. “We like you where you are.”

Robinson explains that the recorder/treasurer is supposed to be a passive observer of council meetings, something that is not in her nature.

Hendrickson mutters something that is lost in the din of conversation. Robinson asks her to repeat.

“You heard me, I cussed: For criminey’s sake!” she says.

The meeting adjourns, but the council members stay at the meeting table, talking.

A man who lives just outside McCaskill walks in and takes a seat at the table. He heard about the community center grant on the radio and says he cannot believe that with a $15 trillion federal debt, the government is giving a town of 84 people $208,000.

Wilson corrects him, saying the population is now close to 100, but the man continues. There is no way a place the size of McCaskill should be getting that much money, he says.

“Your gripe’s not with us. It’s with the federal government,” Catherine Robinson sighs.

Wilson cuts the man off when he persists.

“We need this community center,” she says, and declares the meeting adjourned for a second time.

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The first thing you notice driving through McCaskill is the half-demolished church that stands in the middle of town, its roof beams jutting out like exposed ribs.

Running along the highway just below is an unexpected counterpoint: a springtime mural of flowers and greenery painted on a stretch of waist-high aluminum fence.

The juxtaposition is fitting. The church is owned by Wilson, the McCaskill native, and is in the process of being torn down.

The fence was painted by Hendrickson, the artist from California, and gained local notoriety when it was featured as B-roll footage in an episode of Country Music Television’s “My Big Fat Redneck Wedding.”

The stirrings of progress in McCaskill have prompted a sense of optimism about town’s future among old-timers and newcomers alike.

Wilson said a couple who moved to the area from Colorado are hoping to open a small mom-and-pop operation in one of the vacant storefronts. There will be groceries, a small lunch menu, some outdoor picnic tables and space for farmers to sell their fruits and vegetables.

“They could bring in a lot of people,” Wilson said. “They’d make a killing.”

The store may never open, and progress is slow, but there are hints of a McCaskill that hasn’t been seen for a long time.

“I told the mayor I want to see it improve,” Brown said. “I wished it looked like it did years ago.”