El Dorado: Something Old, Something New

Editor’s note: This article, written by Rex Nelson, appears in the latest magazine edition of Talk Business & Politics, which you can read here.

Richard and Vertis Mason didn’t plan to take on the restoration of an entire downtown after moving back to south Arkansas in 1975. It just sort of happened.

Richard Mason, who’s now in his 70s, is a graduate of Norphlet High School who’s steeped in the culture of the south Arkansas oil and gas industry. Timber harvesting and cotton production dominated the region’s economy in the late 1800s and early 1900s. That changed in January 1921 when Dr. Samuel T. Busey, a physician and oil speculator, completed the drilling of the Busey No. 1 well southwest of El Dorado.

“The discovery well touched off a wave of speculators into the area, seeking fame and fortune from oil,” Kenneth Bridges writes for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. “The Busey No. 1 well would produce oil for only 45 days, but El Dorado changed from an isolated agricultural city of about 4,000 residents to the oil capital of Arkansas. By 1923, El Dorado boasted 59 oil contracting companies, 13 oil distributors and refiners and 22 oil production companies.

“The city was flooded with so many people that no bed space was available for them, leading to whole neighborhoods of tents and hastily constructed shacks being erected throughout the city. El Dorado’s population reached a high of nearly 30,000 in 1925 during the boom before dropping to 16,241 by 1930 and rising to 25,000 by 1960. Oil production, after plummeting by the early 1930s, recovered later in the decade.”

During the 1920s boom, a newspaper reporter noted that a person walking along what became known as Hamburger Row could “purchase almost anything from a pair of shoes to an auto, an interest in a drilling tract or have your fortune told.”

Mason spent much of his time – when he wasn’t delivering the Arkansas Gazette, the Shreveport Times and the El Dorado Daily News – hunting, fishing and trapping. He would watch as saltwater ran from oil wells into streams, killing fish and vegetation. He said that he thought crusted salt, shining in the sun and crunching beneath his feet during dry periods, was “the natural order” in south Arkansas. Norphlet had boomed along with El Dorado during the 1920s. Workers moved there by the hundreds, and gamblers and prostitutes followed.

A visitor arriving in the area by train in 1937 said, “I wondered what I had come to. It looked like a moonscape.”

Richard Mason worked his way through college at the University of Arkansas, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geology. His father, who had worked for more than two decades at an asphalt plant, was killed in an automobile accident when Mason was a college sophomore. His mother later ran a women’s clothing store in El Dorado.

Mason and his wife headed to Houston following graduation to search for a job. He was hired by what’s now ExxonMobil as an exploration geologist. Mason worked for the company on the famous King Ranch of south Texas for two years and then worked another two years in Libya before being transferred to Corpus Christi, Texas. It was in Corpus Christi that he decided he didn’t want to spend the remainder of his career working for a large corporation. Mason left the company in 1968 and later teamed up with a Corpus Christi wildcatter named Joe Baria to form Gibraltar Energy Co.

Gibraltar drilled 28 wells, making small finds along the way. Mason then met a geologist in Mississippi named Hilton Ladner, who wanted to explore an area known as the Black Warrior Basin near Columbus, Miss. Their first two test wells showed promise. A third well confirmed that they were onto something big. They had discovered a gas field eight miles long and two miles wide.

Mason and his wife were thinking of moving to Columbus in 1975 when they saw a for-sale sign on a 20-acre tract at the end of Calion Road in El Dorado. It once had been home to what Richard Mason describes as a “barbecue-and-beer joint.” The couple bought the property, built their home and have been in El Dorado ever since. After his business partner retired in 1977, Richard Mason became the sole owner of Gibraltar.

On a warm fall evening, Richard and Vertis Mason sit on a wooden deck beside the pond behind their home and recount their years of work to revitalize downtown El Dorado. They were simply looking for office space when they were bit by the historic preservation bug. They realized that their beloved south Arkansas was in the midst of a long economic decline and decided to do something about it. They’ve purchased and renovated 17 buildings through the years. They’ve also planted more than 1,000 trees in the downtown area while adding park benches, planters and even phone booths from London.

“Early on, we would start businesses just to get stores in the buildings we owned,” Vertis Mason says. “Later, retailers started coming from other parts of town.”

For much of the 20th century, Union County was at the top of per capita income rankings for the state. A major player in the county was Lion Oil Co., which financed discovery wells in the Shuler Field in 1937. Thomas H. Barton had acquired Lion Oil in 1928 and later became recognized as a leading capitalist and philanthropist. Barton Coliseum in Little Rock was named for him.

Barton sold Lion Oil to the Monsanto Corp. in 1956. Meanwhile, Charles H. Murphy, who took over his family’s Murphy Oil Corp. in 1951, ensured that the company stayed in El Dorado. Since then, Murphy Oil has spun off Deltic Timber Corp. and Murphy USA Inc., making El Dorado the home of three publicly held companies.

El Dorado also became a chemical and manufacturing center. During World War II, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers entered into a partnership with Lion Oil and supplied $28 million for the construction of the Ozark Ordinance Plant to produce ammonium nitrate. Lion acquired the plant for a fraction of the construction costs at the end of the war. The plant became part of El Dorado Chemical Co. in 1983. In 1965, Great Lakes Chemical Corp. began processing underground brine at El Dorado into a number of products, including flame retardants.

Along with the rest of south Arkansas, though, El Dorado began losing population in the 1980s. The city had held steady with a population of between 25,000 and 26,000 people in the 1960, ’70 and ’80 censuses. In the 1990 census, the population dropped to 23,146. It fell to 21,530 in 2000 and 18,884 in 2010. The city’s leaders believed that one way to stem the population loss was to capitalize on El Dorado’s wealth of historic commercial and residential properties, many of which had been built during the 1920s oil boom. There are three historic districts:

– The El Dorado Commercial Historic District is composed of 68 buildings and one monument. Of those buildings, 36 were built during the 1920s. The centerpiece of the district is the Union County Courthouse, which was constructed in 1927-28 of cut limestone block. The nine-story First Financial Bank Building and the seven-story Murphy Building tower over the district.

– The Murphy-Hill Historic District is a residential area just north of the business district. Homes were built there from 1880 until 1957. Almost 75% of the homes were constructed during the first half of the 20th century. Of the 121 buildings in the district, 107 were originally residential, three were multifamily residences, one was a church and 10 were commercial structures.

– The Mahony Historic District is also a residential area north of the commercial district. The neighborhood contains 163 buildings and is in parts of five additions that were platted from 1908-23. There are 119 structures that were constructed in the 1920s and another 32 were built during the 1940s and 1950s. All but five of the district’s buildings were constructed prior to 1962.

Building on the work already done by the Masons and other preservationists, the leadership of El Dorado decided to try to transform their city into a cultural center that would attract visitors from across south Arkansas, north Louisiana and east Texas. Destination developer Roger Brooks and his team from the Seattle-based Destination Development International were hired to devise a plan for rebranding and marketing the city.

After completion of the plan, El Dorado Fifty for the Future formed an organization known as El Dorado Festivals & Events Inc. An El Dorado native named Austin Barrow was hired to head the nonprofit entity charged with transforming El Dorado into the Festival City of the South. After graduating from El Dorado High School, Barrow received his bachelor’s degree from Louisiana Tech University and then a master of fine arts in drama from the University of Arkansas. He performed on stage and screen in Chicago and Los Angeles and later taught theater at the college level.

Voters already had taken an important step when they provided funding for downtown’s El Dorado Conference Center, which has banquet seating for up to 1,000 people and theater seating for up to 2,500 people. In May 2013, the American Institute of Steel Construction announced that the design of the conference center by the Little Rock architectural firm Polk Stanley Wilcox had received the highest recognition possible. The facility also houses South Arkansas Community College’s student services center, tying the downtown commercial district to the college.

Brooks first suggested that El Dorado start a Shakespeare festival. But since there already was such a festival at Conway, the downtown blueprint evolved. What emerged was a plan to renovate the Rialto Theater, renovate a huge former automobile dealership behind the Rialto and build an amphitheater. More than $40 million already has been raised for the effort.

When he was young, El Dorado attorney and businessman Edwin Alderson worked at radio station KELD-AM. He now owns the station. His interest in radio and music led him to start collecting vinyl LPs and 45s. After years of pursuing his hobby, Alderson had one of the best collections of its kind in the country.

He chose to donate the collection to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum at Cleveland and became friends with the museum’s president and chief executive officer, Terry Stewart. Stewart, a native of Daphne in south Alabama, had taken the helm of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, four years after it opened. The Plain Dealer at Cleveland wrote that he brought “stability to an institution that had gone through a quick succession of four previous directors.”

Stewart stayed at the internationally recognized museum until retiring at the end of 2013. He had ensured that the museum remained profitable and was instrumental in working out an agreement with the New York-based Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation to bring the annual induction ceremony (usually held at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel) to Cleveland every three years. Stewart also oversaw a capital campaign that raised more than $30 million for an extensive museum redesign and the development of a library and archives. About 450,000 people visit the museum each year with an estimated annual economic impact on Cleveland of more than $100 million.

In a 2012 interview, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson said Stewart “always has been very easy to work with. He understands how to get things done.”

Stewart earned more than $578,000 in 2012. In other words, he was among the big guns in the museum and entertainment worlds. Before joining the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he had been the president and chief operating officer of Marvel Entertainment Group. Stewart was named the CNBC Marketing Executive of the Year after Marvel went public in 1991. Stewart, who earned his bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University and his law degree from Cornell University, collects everything from jukeboxes to concert and movie posters.

After announcing his retirement from the Hall of Fame, Stewart told an interviewer: “In my life of pop culture, it was always about music, movies and comic books for me, with music at the top. The opportunity that I’ve had to play some small role in the preservation and memorialization of this music that changed my life and the world is just incredible. It staggers me that I’ve been here and that I’ve been able to do this. There are interesting things going on in the music world, which continues to change in terms of how music is made and distributed. … I can’t imagine not doing something every day. I love being active and busy. You watch some people who sit down after they retire and usually wither away. Ain’t gonna happen.”

Somehow Alderson convinced Stewart to use his talents to help El Dorado. While Barrow will continue to serve as the president of El Dorado Festival & Events, Stewart has come aboard as the chairman and CEO.

“We want to make El Dorado a cultural destination focusing on entertainment and great food that will draw people from around the region and potentially around the country,” Barrow says. “We believe that with his well-recognized background in the entertainment industry, Terry Stewart is the ideal person to help us do that.”

Stewart said at the time of his hiring: “My career has taken many twists and turns through the years, and that’s how I live it. I studied engineering and education and then got a master’s in business and a law degree. I worked in banking, strategic planning and business development, but I was always drawn to music and the arts in general. That’s what made working for Marvel and then the Rock Hall a dream come true for me. Working with El Dorado Festivals & Events will give me an opportunity to harness my passions and hopefully make a positive impact on the quality of life for this region and highlight this exceptional town.”

Following a career that has seen him on a first-name basis with some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry, Stewart seems genuinely excited about the chance to help transform a town in the pine woods of south Arkansas into something special. He said El Dorado’s leaders made the right move in hiring architect Paul Westlake, the managing director of the firm Westlake Reed Leskosky, which has offices in Cleveland, Phoenix, Washington, New York and Los Angeles. Westlake, one of the youngest architects to have been elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects, has come up with a plan for renovating the Rialto and surrounding properties.

“His firm is the No. 1 design firm in America in my opinion,” Stewart says. “He specializes in theaters and other performance venues.”

Six of the properties in the Commercial Historic District already are on the National Register of Historic Places. Stewart and Barrow want to have five performance venues in a dense cluster near the town square.

The Rialto opened in 1929 with seating for 1,400 people. There’s an orchestra pit since live stage shows were held in addition to movies. The Rialto closed in 1980 but was restored by Richard and Vertis Mason a few years later.

“What we want to emphasize is seating quality as much as quantity,” Barrow says. “We’ll reduce the seating to around 900 seats with a bar in the front and a rear lobby and café that uses an existing building that once housed Trinca Shoe Repair.”

Another key facility is the former Griffin Auto Co. building. The three brothers who founded Griffin Auto Co. came to Union County from North Carolina in 1899 and opened a livery stable. As automobiles increased in popularity, the Griffin brothers obtained a Ford dealership in 1915. Once the oil boom began, they constructed a building in 1927 on Locust Street at the south end of Washington Street.

The brothers had given up their Ford franchise a few years earlier but began selling Buicks in 1928 and added a Chevrolet dealership in 1931. There was also a filling station, a repair shop and even a horse stable and riding pen. A 1931 brochure noted: “The Griffin Auto Co. now stands ready at all times to serve the needs of the motoring public through any of its numerous departments with courteous attendants, factory-trained mechanics and the will to serve as its creed.”

The El Dorado Glass & Mirror Co., which has been in the building since 1982, will be moving to a new location. The building is large enough for an events center that will handle 1,800 people seated and close to 4,000 standing. Stewart and Barrow envision a restaurant and lounge in the front of the building with a regular schedule of live entertainment along with a black-box theater in the building’s full basement. An amphitheater adjoining the building will be designed to seat 6,000 to 7,000 people.

Stewart also would like to see artists’ quarters downtown.

Richard Mason, who has been a driver of downtown development for decades now, thinks the plan can succeed.

“You have to create enough critical mass to become a destination,” he says. “We’ve done that with retail shops and restaurants. We run into people from as far away as Shreveport who come here to do their Christmas shopping. These entertainment venues are the next step in the process.”