Helena → Stuttgart

What it is now

A German Lutheran minister named George Adam Buerkle bought seven thousand acres of this prairie in 1878 and started a colony, and named it for Stuttgart in Germany. The town incorporated in 1889 and is the seat of Arkansas County's northern district; DeWitt holds the southern.

This is a rice town in the most literal sense. Riceland Foods was founded here in 1921, is owned by about six thousand farmer members and is the largest rice miller and marketer in the world. Producers Rice Mill, founded here in 1943, has more than twenty-five hundred members farming around three hundred and fifty thousand acres. The federal Dale Bumpers National Rice Research Center and the University of Arkansas rice station are both here. Arkansas harvests something like forty percent of the rice grown in the United States.

You arrive at the tail end of harvest, about seven weeks before the ducks and the hunters.

Eat and drink

• PJ's Coffee, 210 W 22nd St — A few blocks from camp and open at seven.
• Kibb's BBQ, 1102 E Harrison St — Open late on a Friday, downtown.
• Walmart, 406 E 22nd St — If you need to resupply, and it is walkable.

If you have an hour

• The Museum of the Arkansas Grand Prairie, 921 E 4th St — Free, open until four. Twenty thousand square feet on rice and waterfowl, a walk-through recreation of the early town with a dirt street and wooden sidewalks, and duck effigy pottery made here around the year 1100.
• Mack's Prairie Wings — Out on Highway 63. It is a destination store for duck hunters and unlike anything you have in your town.

City of Stuttgart →Museum of the Arkansas Grand Prairie →Wings Over the Prairie →

What it is now

Marvell is a railroad town from the 1870s, named for Marvell M. Carruth, who owned the land and sold fifty lots for a depot. Carruth Avenue, which you ride, carries his name.

Levon Helm was born outside Elaine in 1940 and raised at Turkey Scratch, about seven miles from here. His parents were sharecroppers on a cotton farm. He went to school in Marvell from fourth grade through high school and started his first band here. He drummed and sang for The Band and was the only American in it.

The house at the corner of Elm Street and Carruth Avenue, across from City Hall, is the one he grew up in. It stood at Turkey Scratch until it was bought to save it from demolition, moved twice, and given to the Marvell Civic Club, who put it in this small park and restored it. It is public, and there is a bronze bust of Helm by Kevin Kresse and an Arkansas Delta Music Trail marker beside it. Stop if you want to. It is on the Arkansas Register of Historic Places.

Sam Carr, who drummed behind Frank Frost and Big Jack Johnson, is also from Marvell. Two Delta drummers from a town of eight hundred and fifty.

There is no food or water on the route through town. The E-Z Mart and the Dollar General are both out on Highway 49.