Rural Lafayette County, with one-third its 1930s population, braces for impact as the epicenter of a rapidly intensifying global rush for lithium.
LAFAYETTE COUNTY, Ark.—There are boom-and-bust ghost towns and there are towns that dissipate over decades, slowly wilting away until a place is no longer a place.
Downtown Lewisville is such a place.
The Lafayette County seat has one unplugged traffic light and the three-block span between the police and fire station and county courthouse is a crypt of calcified commerce, clay buffed-brick husks with sagging canopies shading boarded storefronts and empty sidewalks.
Its silence muffles the blow-by throttles of Mack trucks hauling timber in girded flatbeds on nearby Route 82.
“Downtown has been in decline since the 1940s,” Lafayette County Judge Valarie Clark said, noting the courthouse is the only place to get a cup of morning coffee without driving five miles east to Stamps.
The former circuit court clerk is in her first four-year term as county judge, which in Arkansas’ municipal government structure makes her the elected county executive and non-voting chair of a nine-seat Quorum Court, similar to a county commission.
A lifelong Lafayette County resident, Clark, 48, has seen her county—smallest of the 75 in Arkansas and third least-populous—bleed out people for decades.
“There were 10,000 people here about 20 years ago, 6,100 now,” she told The Epoch Times in late September, her estimates confirmed by United States Census records that chart diminishing demographics since its peak in the mid-1930s, when nearly 18,000 lived in Lafayette County.
In fact, fewer people now live in this rural nook of Arklatex—Texas 30 miles west, Louisiana 30 miles south—than in the 1890s. Lewisville’s 867 residents and Stamps’ 1,200 population in 2024 are far less than their 1920 headcounts.
Beginning in 2000, Clark said, the area’s furniture industry closed and 600 jobs left. Alan White Furniture was “the last to shut its door” in 2005, prompting collateral shuttering of sawmills that supported the region’s loblolly and shortleaf pine lumber industry.
But a reversal of Lafayette County’s century-long fade may be afoot or, better said, underfoot.
There’s a “white gold” rush in Arklatex, a high-stakes global race to extract battery-grade lithium from the Smackover Formation’s arch across Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas.
The epicenter of this contest is in Lafayette County, with ground zero running through the desiccated, deserted streets of downtown Lewisville.
“We’re a little flower,” Clark said. “We’re about to bloom.”
By John Haughey
