Southern Tenant Farmers Museum to Celebrate 10th Anniversary
TYRONZA, Ark. — The Southern Tenant Farmers Museum, one of Arkansas State University’s Heritage Sites, is celebrating its 10th anniversary with several events, Thursday, Oct. 6.
Headlining the events is a sharecroppers lunch at the Tyronza Senior Center, 135 South Main Street. The lunch is free to the public and available from 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. There are free museum tours throughout the day, and visitors will be served punch and cookies.
During the evening, 1930s movies will be shown outdoors behind the senior center. The movies begin at sundown and visitors are asked to bring lawn chairs and blankets.
The Southern Tenant Farmers Museum enhances knowledge and understanding of tenant farming and agricultural labor movements in the Mississippi River Delta in an effort to preserve the history and promote the legacy of sharecropping, tenant farming and the farm labor movement.
The museum is located in the historic Mitchell-East Building in Tyronza. During the 1930s, this building housed the dry cleaning business of H. L. Mitchell and the service station of Clay East, two of the organizers of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in 1934, serving as the unofficial headquarters for the union until offices were moved to Memphis for safety.
In 2001, the Tyronza City Council donated the Mitchell-East building and land to Arkansas State for a museum. The grand opening of the museum was Oct. 6, 2006. In 2010, the STFM was entered into the National Register of Historic Places.
Restoration of this building and development of the museum were made possible through grants from the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council and a “We the People” Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
For additional information about the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum, contact Linda Hinton, director of the museum, at (870) 487-2909 or visit http://stfm.AState.edu.
