ShareThisTURRELL, Ark. - On her first night in her new home in this town's former post office, Bernice Claxton's eyes flew wide open when a freight train rumbled by.
"I want to go back" to Memphis, said Claxton, 64, who'd grown up there and worked as a maid. Then she and her minister husband left for a quieter life in a little Arkansas town pronounced "turl."
Turrell's population peaked at 1,041 people in 1980 and declined to 970 a decade ago. Now the town, a relic of the Delta economy, has 874 residents.
There weren't enough students left to meet the state's 350-student minimum enrollment for the school district. No more "Friday Night Lights" for the Turrell High School Rockets. The school closed last year. Its students were bused 14 miles south to Marion, Ark.
The Claxtons are trying to slow or stop the decline.
"The Lord works in mysterious ways," says the Rev. Calvin Claxton, 66. While others were getting out of Turrell, he moved there about 10 years ago with Bernice and, eventually, their four grown children. He preaches in the old Turrell Theater where Roy Rogers and Gene Autry movies used to be the biggest attractions.
When he isn't preaching, Claxton, drives his Isuzu Rodeo through the Delta selling Bibles, medicinal herbs and reference books about how to get and stay saved.
His drive takes him through town after town in the same predicament as Turrell. Many small farm towns up and down the Delta grew through the 1970s. But since 2000, 12 of the 13 incorporated towns in Crittenden County, Ark., have lost population.
The first reliable cotton-picking machines, built by International Harvester, showed up just after World War II. Each machine could replace about 40 farmhands. Displaced workers had to look for other jobs within driving distance or move on.
"Towns of some size could bring in low-wage, labor-intensive industries," says Dr. James Cobb, a University of Georgia history professor and author of "The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity."
Farm workers often took factory jobs but soon faced job losses again. The small Delta towns that once had grown like farm crops had nothing to build on, says Cobb.
Turrell tried to attract a Toyota plant and a Walmart distribution center. But it was one of many Delta towns that struck out.
"People are having to move to where there's work and decent wages," says Nelson Catalina. His father owned a grocery store in Turrell until it burned in the 1980s. Catalina was a basketball point guard who led the Turrell Rockets to a 38-1 season his senior year and eventually became head coach at Arkansas State. Now he's a financial adviser for Merrill Lynch in Jonesboro, Ark.
With schools closing, he sees little future for his hometown.
"Once you've lost your school ... there's nothing left to rally around."
As farm laborers left, once-bustling Turrell became a virtual ghost town, says Rick Baer, a Memphis real estate agent whose family had owned many of its businesses. His late father Herman had run the H. Baer Department store and served as mayor. Unoccupied, the buildings became almost uninsurable.
"It was so difficult to get rid of those buildings. They did almost all they could to give the buildings away just to keep people in them," says Baer.
Claxton bought the old post office building first and began his church there.
Later, the Claxtons bought the nearby bank and decided to expand their home by building an "addition" to connecting the structures.
Their son-in-law, construction worker Leander Scott, has done most of the carpentry work that has transformed the old buildings' interiors. While Scott spreads fresh tar on flat roofs that sometimes leak, Claxton works indoors when the weather is cold. She had a heart attack five years ago and has slowed to "a comfortable pace."
She and her husband planted 15 crape myrtle trees between the railroad tracks and the strip of downtown buildings.
Scott did most of the work when the Claxtons converted the theater to the new church. And he is helping the Claxton's oldest daughter transform the old department store into a home.
A building next to the church will become a dining hall to feed the poor as part of the church ministry. Down the street, the Claxtons' son, Calvin III, lives with his family in a former pool hall. His two children are bused to Marion schools. He sees living in Turrell as part of a divine plan: "Until God says it's time for me to be someplace else, my job is to stay in His will."
In all, the Claxtons now own seven of the nine buildings downtown and have painted the storefronts in shades of brown and green. They blend with natural brick tones from Bernice Claxton's home on the street's south end to the town's only surviving business, a liquor store, on the north.
Liquor-store owner Jackie Hill is trying to sell the business. Her clients are disappearing.
"It used to be swinging here," says Hill, who lives about 10 miles away in Tyronza, Ark.
Bernice Claxton shops for groceries in West Memphis, about 30 minutes from home, taking an ice chest for refrigerated items. Still, she appreciates living "where there aren't a lot of sirens or ambulances or police or anything," she says. "I like it just the way it is."
The drone of an afternoon freight train almost drowns out her voice, but the sound makes her smile: "Now it's like a storybook train passing through."
(Michael Lollar reports for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn.)
