Pfeiffer Country: The Tenant Farms and Business Activities of Paul Pfeiffer in Clay County, Arkansas, 1902-1954

Paul Pfeiffer left his comfortable life in Saint Louis, Missouri. He left his prosperous business along the mighty Mississippi: the information superhighway of his day. Fancy restaurants would no longer be a part of his life. He would no longer entertain the elite of a great metropolis. He left all of that behind when he moved to the bottomlands of Eastern Arkansas in 1902. If he did so to make a difference in the lives of thousands of poor farmers, then he made the mark he intended. Pfeiffer came to own much of Clay County, Arkansas. He joined a much-disliked strata of American society: landowners whose "sharecroppers" were often helpless to improve their lot, or that of their children. But Paul Pfeiffer did make a difference in the lives of those who paid him in kind to work his land. He eschewed the usual cycle of poverty for his workers, eventually giving them the land they worked. He was a soul who lived-and fashioned the lives of others-several generations "ahead of his time."