El Dorado, Arkansas, was the richest town in the state for decades, thanks to an oil boom that began with a gusher so strong it stained laundry on clotheslines a mile away. Much industry came, then dried up when the oil wells did. But Murphy Oil’s founding family, who never left, has made a big bet on a big question: Can the enrichment of culture stop the kids from moving away?
Story by Tony Rehagen | Photographs by Terra Fondriest
Joanna Benson never wanted to come back to El Dorado, Arkansas.
Though generations of bored teens have dubbed the town of 18,000 “Hell Dorado,” Benson remembers her childhood in the 1980s and 1990s as pleasant enough. Her father was a meter reader for the water company, and her mother worked at the public library. The only time she realized she might be poor was when she showed up at the birthday party of a schoolmate whose parents worked for Murphy Oil, one of the town’s largest employers, and they lived in a two-story house. Still, Benson moved relatively freely between social circles of black people, who comprised more than half of the population, a growing Latino community, and wealthier whites. When Benson was in sixth grade, her father was promoted and moved the family out of their ramshackle single-story on the poorer south side and into a well-appointed brick home right next door to the high school. Benson says her father used the proximity as an excuse not to buy her a car when she turned 16.
A vehicle is more than just a luxury in a town like El Dorado (pronounced locally as EL dor-AY-do). For a precocious youth trapped inside a dried-up Arkansas oil town enclosed by a perimeter of rusted derricks and dormant pumpjacks, a car key unlocks the cell from the inside. Benson had ambitions of acting and dancing, but it was a four-and-a-half-hour drive west to the theaters and museums of Dallas; four hours to Beale Street in Memphis. Benson dreamed of California, where a half-brother lived, but when she was finally able to afford her own car, she settled for the lonesome two-hour drive up U.S. 167 to Little Rock. She didn’t bother checking the rearview.
The state’s biggest city certainly had more cultural diversity than Benson’s hometown, but opportunities for working artists were still scarce. She took her theater degree from Southern Arkansas University and went to work for a company that made cards and invitations. She got married. Four years went by. The career stalled; the marriage fell apart. Benson came home to regroup. In 2013, she married a local boy, one of the few who didn’t flee. Benson started a photography business and went to work managing a friend’s downtown spa. She gave birth to a daughter, bought a house, dug her roots back into the south Arkansas soil, and braced for the slow-passing seasons of a small-town life.
Joanna Benson with her husband & daughter.
It was around this time that the gossip swappers who came into the spa started jawing about a big to-do coming to El Dorado. The Murphy family, the oil barons who built and continued to buttress this town, were raising money — lots of money — to revive El Dorado. This was to be more than a mere facelift. The idea was to change the city’s entire image, to transform El Dorado into a regional arts and entertainment mecca. The project was named the Murphy Arts District — with the rather apt acronym MAD.
The notion that concert-goers, theater enthusiasts, and art lovers, to say nothing of the artists themselves, would intentionally come to no doubt struck many as at best a waste of resources and at worst, a joke. But there were obviously some very powerful people who were willing to take the risk. And there were a few artistic souls like Joanna Benson who allowed themselves to envision that reality.
“I wasn’t super excited about moving back,” says Benson. “Knowing this was coming made me feel good about coming back to Hell Dorado.”
The slow demise of the rural South is an oft-played jukebox ballad. Every community has a slightly different twist on the same refrain. A local factory, mine, or sawmill closed, taking all the jobs to the city, overseas, or eliminating them entirely. The mom-and-pop storefronts and family farms were run out of business or bought up by corporate interests. The families who stuck it out — or were just plain stuck — watched their children chase opportunity up the highway on-ramps toward the nearest college town or big-city skyline. They rarely came back. In 1930, 44 percent of Americans lived out in the country or in a small town like El Dorado. Today, that number is down to 14 percent.
Meanwhile, the highways cut through the country, bypassing Main Streets and town squares that once thrived on the lifeblood traffic. Today if a traveler happens to spot one of the green city limits signs that can’t be replaced fast enough to reflect the plummeting population, they know they’re probably lost.
If a motorist happens to wander off U.S. Highway 167 on Exit 16, about 10 miles north of the Arkansas-Louisiana border, and turns right onto Main Street, they’ll encounter El Dorado. They’ll pass the East Main Baptist Church and a patchwork of housing from early 20th century bungalows to mid-century ranches to clusters of hunkered-down mobile homes. They’ll drive across the train tracks, past the Dollar General, the Hurry Back Food Mart, Yummy Donuts, JJ’s BBQ, and dark, rundown storefronts that appear to be vacant.
The downtown sits in the shadow of the twin high-rise headquarters, tall as any church steeple, of Murphy Oil and its retail branch, Murphy USA. The two are worth a combined $9 billion and together employ nearly 700 people locally. They are also the town well for philanthropy, and that includes a large portion of the $100 million that has been poured into the eponymous six-block Murphy Arts District. Travelers can already stop and be awed by the initial results.
Photographer Terra Fondriest’s gallery of residents and businesses that call El Dorado home.
Most of Phase I of the project was completed in 2017. The 1928 Griffin Auto Co. Building, formerly a gas station, workshop, and showroom for Model T’s at Locust Street and Jefferson Avenue, has been gutted and reinvented as an “industrial chic” farm-to-table restaurant with a $13 smoked trout salad and a cabaret lounge with a $15 barrel proof old-fashioned. The workshop floor in the back has been converted into the cavernous 2,200-seat First Financial Music Hall with several bars and a VIP viewing loft. The adjacent lot has been dug up and artificially turfed into an amphitheater that can accommodate 8,000. There are new steel stalls for the farmer’s market across Hill Avenue from a two-acre playscape for kids that opened in May: tunnels, slides, a zip line, and a splash pad, where water gushes from an oil derrick.
Phase II sits a block up on Cedar Street, where the McWilliams Building, an abandoned four-story furniture factory, will be turned into a 10,000-square-foot art gallery complete with housing for artists-in-residence. Next door, the 1929 vaudeville Rialto Theater is fenced off in chain-link. The incandescent and neon bulbs of its classic marquee are dark but still somehow illuminate a dormant majesty from those boom years that awaits MAD’s planned $32 million awakening; the letterbox still reads COMING SOON.
The 1929 vaudeville Rialto Theater in the midst of an impressive renovation.
Perhaps as impressive as the scope of these renovations are the resumes of the people behind the venture. First, of course, there is Madison Murphy, heir to the Murphy empire, former board chairman of Murphy Oil and current chair of Murphy USA. He is a lifelong resident of El Dorado. But Murphy’s vision and drive has inspired some movers and shakers to give El Dorado a try. Murphy Arts District CEO Terry Stewart was formerly CEO of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and president of Marvel Comics before coming aboard in 2014. Stewart brought in architect Paul Westlake, who had a hand in designing the Rock Hall and four of the six largest performing arts centers in the U.S. The MAD chief marketing officer, Bob Tarren, came from jobs with Circuit City corporate, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Frick Pittsburgh, and he was succeeded in late 2019 by Lisaann Dupont, the former communications and digital marketing guru for the Ryman Auditorium. Even Austin Johnson, executive chef in charge of the Griffin and the food at the other venues, has a Parisian pedigree.
Madison Murphy, heir to the Murphy black gold empire, former board chairman of Murphy Oil and current chair of Murphy USA, is a lifelong resident of El Dorado.
Terry Stewart, Murphy Arts District CEO, was formerly CEO of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and president of Marvel Comics before coming aboard.
If the scale of this project sounds a bit outsized for a town of 18,000 people, it is. But MAD President and COO Pam Griffin says there are already shoots of early progress: Annual sales tax receipts are up 15 to 20 percent from pre-MAD levels, downtown businesses are growing, and The Haywood, a 70-room boutique hotel and one of the first signs of large-scale independent investment, is set to open downtown this summer.
But El Dorado doesn’t just want transient tourism dollars. The city wants to rebuild its cultural scene, its nightlife, its infrastructure, and the community to make it attractive for companies that might consider relocating here. More importantly, it wants to keep the talented young people who make the Murphy companies run and who could help new companies thrive.
And the only thing bigger than the investment of capital and energy into MAD are the stakes riding on its success.
“It’s always been a little difficult to recruit here,” says Murphy. “And if we can’t recruit people, we can’t stay.”
In the South, as in much of the world, communities were mostly born of geography. Larger cities grew along the natural waterways, either in ocean ports (Charleston), gulf bays (Mobile), bends in the river (Chattanooga), or confluences of waterways (New Orleans) through which goods, money, and people could move freely (except, of course, for enslaved Africans who were treated like goods). Eventually, man-made throughways like the railroads produced the same result (Atlanta). Meanwhile, between these bold dots on the map, smaller settlements sprung up, literally, along the way. These were places to pull off of the wagon trails, the cow paths, and tributaries en route to the city.
However, a few communities owe less to their geography than to their geology. Perhaps the soil was well suited for farming tobacco, cotton, corn, or pine and towns pooled in logical epicenters between vast plantations, where neighboring farmers could trade, commune, and otherwise conduct their business. The same was true in the places where rare minerals were discovered beneath that dirt. In the 1800s, that meant gold or silver. And in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the finds were fossil fuels like coal and oil. These were the boomtowns of the 20th century.
As 1921 dawned, El Dorado was a stop on the way to nowhere — a remote town of timber-cutters and farmers, 3,800 people stranded on the outskirts of the West Gulf Coastal Plain. For years, prospectors, geologists, and oil men had suspected deposits of natural gas in the region, but thus far, the test wells dug in nearby Urbana and Columbia counties had come up dry. Then on January 10, 1921, Dr. Samuel Busey, an outside speculator who had bought oil leases as far away as Bolivia, tapped into a gusher about three-quarters of a mile west of downtown El Dorado. The blast was said to have splattered black oil onto white linens hanging on clotheslines a mile away. The next day, five chartered trains arrived carrying speculators, drillers, and oilmen into Union County. Within two years, El Dorado was the home of 59 oil contracting companies, 13 oil distributors and refineries, and 22 production companies. The town’s population exploded to nearly 30,000.
Oil derricks dot the landscape of El Dorado, which was once the home of 59 oil contracting companies, 13 oil distributors and refineries, and 22 production companies.
Farmers leasing their lands got rich overnight. The story goes that the newly minted oil barons all bought Model T Fords. When a farmer ran out of gas, he would just leave the vehicle alongside the road, head downtown to Griffin Auto, and buy a brand new one. But the money wasn’t all for the landowners and car retailers — there was plenty to go around. The initial prospectors and drillers needed hotel rooms and places to eat. When the oil kept flowing, companies built or moved their refineries, distribution facilities, and headquarters here. Those places all brought workers, who brought their families, who needed houses, churches, stores, and schools. They required good roads and reliable water and electricity.
This infrastructure attracted more business. During World War II, the county’s industrial capacity brought the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which, along with local company Lion Oil, built a $23-million ordinance plant. The plant made explosives and fertilizer after the war. Arkansas ag magnate Jess Merkle built a large-scale poultry processing plant, which eventually became Pilgrims’ Pride, Great Lakes Corporation moved its production of brominated products and flame retardants here, and Cooper Tires opened a rubber factory. For the remainder of the 20th century, per capita income in Union County was the highest in Arkansas.
But then in the 1980s, the boom began to fade. Oil prices declined precipitously. Lion Oil scaled back its operations and eventually sold their interests. In the 1990s, Murphy Oil ceased its drilling operations in southern Arkansas. Other oil companies moved out altogether. Madison Murphy estimates that about 4,000 to 5,000 jobs were lost in El Dorado during the 1980s and 1990s alone. By 2000, the population was down to 21,500. Things got worse. In 2007, Cooper Tires shuttered its rubber factory. Two years later, Pilgrim’s Pride, which had become the town’s largest employer, closed down, eliminating 1,500 employees and contracts for more than 160 local farmers. The 2010 census reported a population of 18,884.
The town didn’t lie down. Richard Mason, a successful oil and gas entrepreneur in Texas, returned to southern Arkansas with his wife, Vertis, and began buying up downtown El Dorado properties, which in 1974 had less than 15 percent occupancy. The Masons invested in renovating those buildings and actively recruited retail stores and hotels. By 2009, Mason LLC’s 17 downtown spaces were 100-percent occupied. The El Dorado Conference Center, with its 12,000-square-foot convention hall and 1,000-seat banquet facility was opened in 2010 — though it has lost money every year since.
Perhaps the biggest investment prior to and including the MAD was the “El Dorado Promise.” In 2007, Murphy Oil, despite not pulling a single drop of oil or gas from the Arkansas soil, set up a $150-million scholarship fund guaranteeing that any student who attends school in El Dorado from kindergarten through 12th grade will have his or her tuition up to the cost of the most expensive public university in the state paid in full. Ten years later, more than 2,000 Promisers had been sent to colleges across 29 states.
A few of the students who are part of the “El Dorado Promise”, a scholarship program established by Murphy Oil to pay the college tuition of El Dorado residents.
But it’s still too early to tell if enough of those Promisers have come back or if the program is attracting enough parents to uproot their families to El Dorado. Meanwhile, the telltale population number has continued to tick downward toward 18,000.
The time seemed right to try something crazy.
“We’re going to go down swinging,” says Murphy.
There’s no escape from the midday sun on this early-May Saturday. Men in polos and khaki shorts crowd beside women in sundresses to take up the limited shade of the farmers’ market stalls along the east end of the MAD amphitheater. But eventually they have to wander out onto the sun-scorched turf to get their $20-cover-charge-worth of reds, whites, and rosés from the Napa Valley and other vaunted U.S. vineyards.
This is the fourth annual Southern Food & Wine Festival, the first held since completion of MAD Phase I, and the lines for entry stretch well out onto the street. A local band plays original alternative music from the massive stage; local performance artists peruse the grounds on stilts wearing pink wigs and carrying Japanese parasols. The Murphy Arts District might be a new concept, but the town knows how to put on a show.
The idea for MAD wasn’t drawn out of a hat. El Dorado is unique in that it has an appreciation for the arts that rivals most Southern towns’ passion for high school football. The tradition dates back to the oil boom, when the businessmen who flooded the town needed something to do with their families in the off hours. The grand Rialto was built in 1929 as a draw for fans of vaudeville and increasingly popular moving picture shows. Founded here in 1956, the South Arkansas Symphony is the oldest continually operating orchestra in the state. Walk into the South Arkansas Arts Center, opened in 1964 on the western edge of downtown, on any given Friday and you’ll see exhibits by local visual artists, perhaps a touring exhibition, and hear singing or music from the auditorium where school children rehearse for recitals, concerts, or plays.
Although plenty of townspeople knew about art and the lords of local industry knew about economic development, no one really seemed to connect the two. Enter Austin Barrow, an El Dorado community theater expat who left right after high school, went to Fayetteville and earned a master’s degree in drama at the University of Arkansas, then ended up building a career in marketing and promotion for theaters and art galleries on the west coast before moving to Georgia, where he was a drama department chair at a small college. In 2010, Madison Murphy and several other town leaders approached Barrow about coming home to oversee their best guess at what might work — an El Dorado Shakespeare Festival.
“I told them it was an absolutely crazy idea,” says Barrow. “Who’s going to come watch Shakespeare in El Dorado, Arkansas?” But Barrow was intrigued by the raw potential in his hometown. “I believe that arts and culture actually can make a difference. El Dorado had a great community effort, we were known for that. But we didn’t have the professional marketing component.”
Barrow joined Stewart, Tarren, and Pam Griffin, then chair of the El Dorado—Union County Chamber of Commerce. The group pitched the two-phase project to the city and met with little to no resistance. MAD was on its way to becoming reality.
But building the thing is only half of the Field of Dreams cliché. Almost as important as how many people come is exactly who those people are. For instance, a scan of the faces sipping chardonnay in the afternoon sun at the Food & Wine Festival reveals a dearth of brown faces. There were even fewer people of color at last night’s five-course food-and-wine pairing which set diners back $175 per person. Leaving the festival and walking the rest of the newly paved brick sidewalks shows the monochrome palette. A visitor would never guess that El Dorado is a town where white people are in the minority.
“The black community was suspicious when [MAD] first came in,” says Jeremy Owens, an El Dorado native and son of a local pastor. “A lot of people were saying ‘Oh man, that’s not going to be for us.’”
Jeremy Owens, an El Dorado native, looks out the front door of Mr. Mike’s CD’s & Tapes
Owens knows first-hand the challenge of trying to reverse generations of learned behavior and integrating the downtown of a Southern town. In 2014, he opened Pandora’s Lounge, a nightclub just across the street from the Rialto. He brought in musical acts playing gospel, R&B, and hip hop. But it was difficult attracting a steady crowd drawing from a small-town pool. The club shut down in 2017. Since then, Owens says he has worked with MAD to attract a diverse array of acts, to give the programming an urban flare. In addition to Brad Paisley and Toby Keith, the MAD venues have hosted Ludacris, Smokey Robinson, Migos, and Gucci Mane. “Before [MAD] you’d hardly see things for the urban community,” says Owens. “Even with the young people, you’d see country music. They went with what they knew. MAD is diving into new territory.”
“The minority [sic] community had been shunned away from the downtown area over the years — whether in reality or by assumption,” says Barrow. “When [Owens] opened up his night club, I do remember there was a sentiment at the time of ‘Oh no, we’re going to have a black nightclub right downtown.’ I remember hearing that whisper. But he had a good run. It began to change the landscape.”
In January 2019, Barrow resigned from MAD to return to his first love — the theater. He was succeeded by Griffin, who was promoted from CFO to President and COO and has since led further efforts to diversify MAD’s offerings and thus its crowds. This includes intentional rotation of genres for the weekly Thursday Night Live and Live Saturday Night shows at the Griffin Restaurant, a variety of comedy shows at the same venue, and a monthly Latin music series to attract the town’s burgeoning Hispanic population. From now through April 4, MAD is collaborating with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville to bring “AstroZone,” an immersive and interactive art installation of giant, inflatable sculptures to First Financial Music Hall. Sponsor Murphy USA is donating gas cards to area schools so that more than 6,000 children can be bused in to experience the exhibit. And Griffin says she is working closely with Veronica Smith-Creer, El Dorado’s first black and first female mayor, to look into other ideas, like a gospel brunch.
“We look to do both free and paid entertainment for all ages and races and genres of music,” says Griffin. “Our mission is to serve the community as a whole and to bring the community together.”
El Dorado locals grabbing a bite to eat at the Old Fashion, an El Dorado institution.
The Southern Food & Wine Festival is capped off on Saturday night with a concert by Jason Isbell, a big get for the small town. Still, the show isn’t quite sold out. There are several empty rows of folding chairs in the back of Griffin Music Hall, the lines for the bar and bathroom are relatively short, and there’s just enough exposed concrete floor to provide a slight echo when Isbell and the 400 Unit launch into a rocker.
The thousand-plus who are here aren’t sitting on their hands. They dance, sway, and sing along with the Alabama-born Americana, a kindred spirit who doesn’t hide his appreciation.
“This is a beautiful town you have,” says Isbell between songs. “Just when you think you’ve been everywhere.”
Among those hollering in the back is Joanna Benson. Technically she’s working tonight. In 2016 she joined MAD as an administrative assistant, eventually taking charge of promotion, doing everything from hosting the media, Instagramming behind-the-scenes photos, or even hanging fliers around town. Once a refugee from “Hell Dorado,” Benson is proud of her hometown and how far it’s come. And she is optimistic about its future. Of course, part of that is now her job. But another part is the hope of a mother whose daughter might one day have a reason to stay.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated where the first director of the Murphy Arts District, Austin Barrow, earned his master’s degree in drama.
