Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Dyess, AR

Dyess (pronounced 'dice') is a town in southwestern Mississippi County, Arkansas, founded in 1934 as Dyess Colony by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal agricultural relief program.

Dyess Colony was the largest agrarian community established by the federal government during the Great Depression.

The federal government bought roughly 15,000 acres of swamp and cutover Delta land for the colony and laid it out with a town center at the hub and some 500 family farmsteads of twenty to forty acres each.

Colonist families were recruited from destitute tenant farmers and sharecroppers across Arkansas, and, reflecting the segregation of the era, eligibility was limited to white families.

The colony was named for William Reynolds Dyess, a Mississippi County native and Arkansas's first WPA administrator; after he died in a January 1936 plane crash, the community was renamed in his honor and officially dedicated on May 22, 1936.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited Dyess in 1936, when the colony claimed some 2,500 residents.

Among the colonists were Ray and Carrie Cash, who arrived in March 1935 with their children, including three-year-old J. R. Cash, the future Johnny Cash, who lived in Dyess until graduating from high school in 1950.

Johnny Cash's song 'Five Feet High and Rising' recalls the colony's evacuation during the January 1937 flood.

Arkansas State University bought the Cash boyhood home in 2011 and restored it, and the Historic Dyess Colony: Boyhood Home of Johnny Cash opened to the public on August 16, 2014.

The Dyess Colony Center administration building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, and the Cash boyhood home was added to the Register in 2018.