What is the Historic Dyess Colony: Boyhood Home of Johnny Cash project?
We’re preserving the home of Johnny Cash and putting it in a much larger social context of the New Deal era of the 1930s and a federal government social experiment to get out of work farmers back on their feet.

It’s not just a shrine to Johnny Cash, it’s the story of what life within the Dyess colony was about and how the Cash family went from being an out of work farm family to making a living and eventually owning their own land.

How is this being done?
The project is a partnership between Arkansas State University, The National Trust for Historic Preservation and the City of Dyess to revitalise the town by focusing on heritage tourism opportunities. It includes restoration of several historical buildings in the town centre, or colony, as well as the Johnny Cash boyhood home.

The Dyess Colony was an agricultural resettlement community during the New Deal era in the 1930s. It was one of President Roosevelt’s projects to get out-of-work farmers back on their feet. The government acquired 16,000 acres of land and divided it into 20- and 40-acre farmsteads. They recruited 500 colonist families, who were out of work and on welfare, to come and live and work on this land and eventually acquire the land by paying back the government from their crop proceeds. Johnny Cash’s parents, Ray and Carrie, were among the colonist families that were recruited. They came here when Johnny was three-years-old.

The site originally included a colony centre, with a two-storey administration building for all the federal offices, a community centre, which later burned down, a theatre and a Co-op store.

The administration building still exists, which we at Arkansas State University own and are restoring. The cinema was built in 1947 and has deteriorated except for the front façade. We’re propping it up and will rebuild it, keeping the historic façade and restoring it. The Co-op store also burned down and eventually we’d like to rebuild that too.

As director of Arkansas Heritage Sites, I’m the overall project director. I supervise the students that work on the project and work with the contractors and the people doing the restoration.

What was the inspiration?
Many people have been interested for a long time in the fact that Johnny Cash came from this small town – it has less than 500 people living here. We were inspired by the fact that even though there’s nothing to do here, people constantly drive by this property to look at it. We know, from messages they’ve left, that they come from all over the world.

But when people drove by, they saw a dilapidated, sagging house. We didn’t want them to come away with the impression that he lived in that condition because he didn’t – he lived in a brand new house that had just been built by the government. For years we’ve wanted to restore it to what it was like when he’d lived there. The problem was that the house was in private ownership and the owner didn’t want to sell. But three years ago he began talking with us at Arkansas State University and we were able to acquire it.

What will the visitor experience be?
The administration building will house a museum with exhibits detailing the Dyess colony and what it was about. It’ll show the life of a typical colonist family, using the Johnny Cash family as an example, and how growing up in Dyess impacted Johnny Cash and his music. Songs like Five Feet High and Rising are about the 1937 flood in the Dyess area, while Picking Time is based on his experience in the fields. All of his music that focuses on family values and growing up poor will be reflected in exhibits.

The theatre building will become a visitor centre. Movies and orientation films will be shown and we can hold special events.

The house will be furnished exactly as it looked when the Cash family lived there. We’re focusing on the period from 1935, when they moved in, to 1950 when Johnny left to go into service.

In time we’ll reconstruct the farmstead buildings that used to be at the Cash home – the barn, smokehouse, outhouse and corncrib – and create a walking trail to connect the houses with the colony centre, which is a mile away.

The project also involves acquiring additional land for visitor services, parking and rest rooms. It’s a massive plan and takes time to implement.

What work has been done so far?
We acquired the administration building in 2010 and the Cash’s house in April 2011. We’ve completely restored the outside of the administration building and are now restoring the interior.

We’ve restored the Johnny Cash house and are landscaping the exterior and furnishing the house. We have the original piano, which is a key piece of furniture as music was so important to the family, and a few smaller items. The original pieces will be displayed at the museum and we’ll put replicas in the house. The house is so small – less than 1,000sq ft (93sq m) – that with a lot of visitors it’ll be very difficult to protect any original furniture.

We’ve worked with the Cash family, who described the furniture and pictures on the walls. We’ve made a virtual model of the house and the furnishings and forward photos to the family to critique. They’ll say: “Yes, that’s what it was like,” or: “No, that pot bellied stove was a little more oval,” or “The sofa was a darker blue than you have it.” When we’re finished, we want it to look as though the Cash family has just walked out of the door to go to church.

How will you protect the home?
That’s going to be a major challenge because the house is so small. We’ll have to limit the number of people who are in there at a time. The tours will originate out of the administration building and there will be about 15 people in a group. It was built of wood that was milled in the area and is a solid house, which will wear well.
It was never painted or decorated inside, so the main thing we need to protect is the linoleum flooring, which two of the rooms still have from the 1930s. We’ll put something over those where people are walking, so they can see the flooring, but don’t wear it out. Tours will last about 30 minutes, as the house is so small, but we expect people to spend longer at the exhibits.

When does it open?
We hope to open the first phase in spring 2014, with the exhibits in the administration building and the Cash house. When we finish the administration building, theatre, out buildings and walkway depends on how our fundraising goes – hopefully within three years.

What are the costs?
The project is costing about $3.2m (£2m, E2.5m). At this point we’ve raised $1.7m (£1m, E1.25m).

The Arkansas Natural Resources Council, which gives grants to state agencies for restoration projects and preserving state owned properties, has given us three grants totalling $1m (£653,000, E765,000) for restoring the administration building. Our annual Johnny Cash music festival has raised $300,000 (£196,000, E229,500) for the house. We’ve just received a grant for $100,000 (£65,300, E76,500) from The National Endowment for the Humanities and have had contributions from private individuals.

How many visitors are expected?
We’ve looked at visitor numbers to the Elvis Presley boyhood home in Tupelo, Mississippi, which is comparable, as both sites represent the very humble roots that two major music icons came from. We’re projecting 30,000 a year initially, increasing to 50,000. We’re in a very rural place, so don’t have big crowds of people – they have to be making a specific trip to get here.

What will the project offer to visitors and the area?
We hope to work with the community to develop other experiences for visitors. It’s a small community, so there’s no lodging, only one restaurant and nowhere to spend any money. It’s up to the community and the surrounding area to provide these opportunities.

We’re looking at creating experiences that will focus on the 1930s era. For example, when the Dyess colony was in operation, it had many communal services, including a cannery where the women would can their fruits and vegetables and then distribute them to the families. We plan to develop an experience where visitors are taught how to can and preserve fruits and vegetables and then take them home.

For the people in the area, the project is going to be a major economic benefit. The town is small and shrinking, so this is its hope for survival. We expect it to create more than 100 new jobs in the area and bring in $10m (£6.5m, E7.6m) annually in visitor related expenditures. They won’t be spending all this money in Dyess, but for all of north east Arkansas, it’s going to have a major impact, as people gear up for the lodging, food and retail opportunities.

How did Arkansas State University become involved?
Through our Arkansas Heritage Sites programme. We also own the Hemmingway-Pfeiffer museum in Piffot, Arkansas, which is where Ernest Hemmingway did some of his writing, and the Southern Tennant Farmers museum in Tyronso, Arkansas, which is where the Southern Tennant Farmers Union was established in 1934. It was the first agricultural union that had both black and white farmers in the same union. It also had women in leadership positions, which was highly unusual.

We also own the Lake Port Plantation in southeast Arkansas. It’s the last remaining antebellum [prior to the American Civil War] plantation home on the Mississippi River and still has many of its original finishes.

All these properties are nationally significant. The sites serve as educational laboratories for our students, as well as being open to visitors, and are an economical catalyst in their area.

What have been the challenges?
The major one is that the entire area of Dyess is made up of gumbo soil, which has clay in it and is very sticky. It moves and shifts when wet and creates major cracks and crevices when it dries. Because of this, the houses are unlevel. That’s one of the reasons the Johnny Cash home looked so bad – it was sagging in the middle and out of kilter. To fix that, and prevent it happening again, we moved the house off the foundation, dug a 7ft (2m)-deep trench where the house sat, removed the gumbo soil and repacked it with a better draining soil. Then we created a 2ft (0.6m)-wide concrete foundation around the perimeter.

The house sits up on triangular peers, which form the foundation of the house. We didn’t want to destroy that historic look, so once we’d put the 2ft foundation in, we hid it with dirt, set the concrete peers back on top of the concrete foundation, then moved the house back. We spent a lot of money on things you can’t see, but that were necessary to save the house from being damaged and shifting in the future.

The house sits on a county road, so local traffic goes by. Ideally, to protect the house, we’d like to close it off, so you can only access it on tours from the administration building, but that’s not possible, so we need to find a way to handle the traffic situation.

Also, we’re being told to pave the road, but we don’t want to, as that’s the gravel dirt road that Johnny Cash walked down to go fishing or to school. We’re looking at how to accommodate a major increase in visitors while maintaining the historic character of the property and the area around it.

How will the experience be developed?
One of the advantages of the project being associated with our Heritage Studies PHD programme is that we want to continue to develop and offer educational programming. As well as the cannery, we plan to do special programming, workshops, seminars and educational programmes. I envisage showing documentaries about all the different aspects of the era.

The project isn’t a shrine to Johnny Cash: it’s about music, the 1930s, the Depression and The New Deal. All these subjects give us many opportunities for developing new experiences.