A Life on the Black River in Arkansas
The memoir of a farmer, rural entrepreneur, and banker
Ewell R. Coleman

The remarkable story of one tireless farmer, rural entrepreneur, and banker
The Black River flows from Missouri into Arkansas east of Branson and west of the Bootheel. It meanders where the foothills of the Ozarks begin to rise out of the Mississippi plain. The area was sparsely populated when E. R. Coleman was a young man. Like the population they served, businesses were modest, mostly small, and scattered. Arkansas was still the Bear State; slogans boasting that it was—or predicting that it would become—the “Land of Opportunity” were yet to be conceived. Coleman’s early years were shaped by the Great Depression, by a family ethic that dictated working as long as there was sunlight in the day, and by a region bordered on the west by Oklahoma’s Dust Bowl and on the east by the mighty—sometimes vengeful—Mississippi River. Told in his own words, this is a genuine American Horatio Alger story of hardscrabble beginnings, working longer and harder than today’s youth might be able to imagine, and plain dealing from cotton fields to board rooms.

Ewell R. Coleman is a lifelong resident of Independence County in north-central Arkansas and has worked in nearly every imaginable capacity that a rural region has to offer. After launching and sustaining a variety of small businesses, he focused on banking in Batesville and neighboring communities

September
6 x 9, 124 pages
$16.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-9800897-8-3 | 0-9800897-8-6
$34.95 cloth
ISBN 978-1-935106-04-3 | 1-935106-04-X

Distributed for the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies