The City That Sam Built

Booming Bentonville is Arkansas’ biggest small town.

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In 1945, Sam Walton bought a Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas. Walton had a head for business, and within three years had tripled the store’s profits. But a dispute with his landlord caused him to sell the shop and open Walton’s Five and Dime in nearby Bentonville. He signed a 99-year lease on the new store in the tiny town square. That space is now the Walmart Museum, and the battered front door of the old Ben Franklin store is its first exhibit.

You probably know that the five-and-dime grew into Walmart, an international retail powerhouse and the largest private employer in the world. Walton’s relentless focus on cost cutting and customer service proved replicable far and wide. The former Army man took up flying, buying his own airplane and zooming around the country to scout new locations and close increasingly big deals.

When the Walmart board of directors pleaded with him, the company’s irreplaceable mastermind, to hire a professional pilot, he flatly refused. If someone else flew the plane, his workaholic brain would force him to deal with the mountains of paperwork that accumulated on the desk that now sits in the museum. His time behind the stick, absorbed in the task of staying airborne, was the only time he had to himself.

By the time Walton died in 1992 at age 74, he had opened 1,960 Walmart stores and was the richest man in America. The ownership of the company went to his wife, Helen, and their four children, Robson, John, Jim, and Alice. Until 2005, five of Forbes magazine’s 10 richest people in America were Waltons.

Walmart is currently building a huge new headquarters in Bentonville. It’s conventional wisdom that, if your company wants to have a long-term relationship with Walmart, you need an office in Bentonville, too — and what producer of consumer goods can afford to ignore the largest retailer on the planet?

On my recent visit, I discovered that Bentonville has all the trappings of a boom town. The streets of the once sleepy community, smack dab in the middle of one of the most impoverished rural areas in North America, now thrum with activity. Everywhere you look, new buildings are popping up. More than once during a recent visit, my GPS tried to direct me down a street that was closed due to heavy construction activity. The houses are a curious mix of the modest ranch homes you find all over rural Arkansas and shiny new dwellings. In recent years, the trucks and SUVs going to and from Walmart offices and warehouses have been joined by cars bearing tourists and lines of helmeted mountain bikers. The stamp of the Walton riches is everywhere, and inescapable. Bentonville today is the town that Sam built.

A More Perfect Union

Alice Walton was born in 1949, while her father was in the early stages of empire building. She built her own career as a banker and money manager, and like her father, cultivated an interest in aviation. From an early age, she loved to paint. On November 11, 2011, she opened the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville. It would prove to be a transformative moment in the history of the city.

“Crystal Bridges was the catalyst,” says Aaron Mullins, director of communications and marketing for Visit Bentonville.

Admission to Crystal Bridges is, and always will be, free. “One of Alice Walton’s visions was to create this world-class museum that could be accessible specifically for schoolchildren in the middle of the country, and for folks both locally and regionally to be able to come in at any time and experience the art,” says Mullins.

The art collection is indeed world-class, as is the architecture that houses it. Crystal Bridges is literally built on a series of bridges over a small pond. I could wander the winding galleries for hours, but I was never far from a window, where I could easily orient myself.

The permanent collection consists solely of works by artists born in the United States, even if their work was done elsewhere. The list is a who’s who of the greatest painters and sculptors our country has produced in the last three centuries: John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Norman Rockwell, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, and so many more.

The current blockbuster exhibit, “We The People: The Radical Notion of Democracy,” collects for the first time outside of the halls of the Library of Congress original copies of our country’s founding documents. On display is a broadside of the Declaration of Independence printed in Philadelphia in 1776; a copy of the Articles of Confederation, and one of only 11 copies of the original printing of the Constitution known to exist in the world. There’s a dog-eared copy of the Federalist Papers, a draft of the Bill of Rights with two additional amendments that was circulated in Congress during the debate leading up to ratification, and a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln.

As impressive as that is, I found the lead-up even more intriguing — a chronological collection of American art, beginning in the pre-colonial era and culminating with contemporary pieces commissioned specifically for the exhibit. The show includes all of the major names from the history of American art — there’s an early Georgia O’Keeffe cityscape with none of her signature flowers, for example — along with many artists you’ve probably never heard of. It reflects the changing concerns of the people of the Republic in a way any cut-and-dried historical account never could.

Today, our concerns continue to evolve. “We The People” brings skill and balance to telling the story of our country, now that we have matured enough to recognize the dark sides of our history. It is unflinching in pointing out that many champions of Enlightenment ideals — human freedom; individual dignity — owned fortunes built on the backs of enslaved people, and that the westward expansion was accompanied by brutal suppressions of the native population who were here for thousands of years before Columbus discovered the so-called “New World.” It is a warts-and-all portrait of America that celebrates our radical notions of self-government while acknowledging the ways we have fallen short of our ideals. It is a call to continue the project of creating a more perfect union.

Museum City

Bentonville is becoming a city of museums. In addition to Crystal Bridges, I enjoyed a visit to The Momentary, a contemporary gallery space associated with the bigger museum that recently hosted cutting-edge work from filmmaker and performance artist Matthew Barney. The museum, located in a former Kraft cheese plant, has both indoor and outdoor performance spaces that have recently hosted acts from indie rockers Japanese Breakfast to the rootsy Americana of Lyle Lovett and John Hyatt. From October 20th to 23rd, the gallery will host Momentous, a four-day electronic music festival featuring performers from all over the world. The Momentary’s crowning element is The Tower Bar, a swanky establishment perched on a five-story structure that was designed to provide patrons with a panoramic view of the rolling Arkansas hills.

Bentonville’s most surprising museum provides a window into the pre-history of this continent. The Museum of Native American History grew from a private collection of arrowheads into a definitive story of the human occupation of the Americas. “David Bogel is the founder of the museum, and he still has a major part in the day-to-day running,” says Jazlyn Sanderson, the programming manager at the museum.

The stunning collection includes artifacts from all over North and South America, including several pieces found here in Shelby County. One of the museum’s crown jewels is an ancient knife made from deer bone and sinew. “It is very, very rare, and fully intact,” Sanderson tells me. “This was found just lying in a cave in Texas. Think about it — someone put it down, walked off, and forgot about it. Then, 2,000 years later, someone picks it up again. That never ceases to amaze me.”

Later, I’m sitting at The Hive, the restaurant at the 21c Hotel. Across from me, a large group of diners are chatting over their meal. I do a double take — is that a giant green penguin at the head of the table?

My server, Neil Casement, assures me I am not seeing things. “Our founders, Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, were in Italy, and there was an art exhibit of red penguins,” he says. “[Brown and Wilson] were art collectors, which is how the whole concept of 21c started. They bought a few of them, and brought them back for their own personal collection. When 21c brought these penguins into the museum for guests to interact with, they loved them so much that they decided to keep them as a mascot. They actually bought the rights for the penguins from the art group in Milan, and they became kind of our symbol. As they opened more locations, they kept the penguins and changed the color for every location. We got green, because we are the Natural State.”

With a first floor devoted to gallery space, the hotel provides a unique experience. “21c is without a doubt, one of the premier attractions that we have, not just for the museum, but also The Hive restaurant, which is fantastic,” says Mullins.

Biking Bentonville

Bentonville is a city built on ambition, and right now its ambition is to become the mountain-biking capital of the world. The city adds an average of 1.5 miles of new bike paths every week, from the easygoing forested undulations of the Coler Mountain Bike Preserve trails to black diamond “gravity” trails that challenge daredevil riders. The purpose is not solely recreational — the city’s current growth spurt is being treated as an opportunity to fully integrate human-powered infrastructure alongside cars and roads.

“It’s what sets us apart from any other mountain bike community in the nation,” says Mullins. “Whether you’re at Moab or you’re out in Denver, you have to drive outside of the city to get to a trailhead. The reason mountain bikers love this place is, you can come here, get a hotel, park your car and leave it. The whole time you’re just on your bike.”

The Bike Inn is a renovated roadside motel that caters to pedal tourism. Steve Campbell, a mountain biker from Houston, stayed there on a return visit to Bentonville. “I came three years ago, and I didn’t get to see enough,” he tells me. “This time, I’ve got it all lined up in my head. The maps have improved, and the city has more stuff going on. It seems to be so much more put together than it was three years ago. I thought it [the Coler Preserve] was awesome. I just biked right from here, and I loved it. And when I was downtown, it reminded me of Austin back in the Nineties.”

Inside the Coler Preserve, Jackie Chasteen stopped for a smoothie at Airship Coffee, a popular establishment accessible only via bike. “The biking is really community-driven,” she says. “Everybody is super supportive of whatever you do.”

“We talk about ourselves as being the mountain bike capital of the world,” says Mullins. “And we want to make mountain biking accessible for everyone. That’s why the trails have been built in a way to create experiences for beginners all the way up to the experts. Some of the events we host are very targeted towards the extreme mountain biker, but most of them are focused, accessible events for the community. This whole city’s becoming a mountain bike community, and we want everybody to feel comfortable.”

Fly Away

The city’s newest amenities are in Osage Park, a recently purchased stretch of wetland that is being remediated and preserved. “We are just over 70 acres, but it’s not your typical urban park,” says site manager Angie Chavez “We’ve got 12.5 acres of open canopy wetland or marsh, and then we also have five acres of lowland forest area. One of the key aspects of this park is promoting native plants and allowing people to get into nature without necessarily leaving their comfort zone. We have boardwalks that run through the wetlands, so people can walk through and not fear snakes or any of that sort of thing.”

The park sits next door to Thaden Field, named for Louise Thaden, a famed aviatrix from the golden age of flight who was a Bentonville native. I could watch the comings and goings of the private planes and helicopters from Louise, a restaurant located as close to the flight line as the FAA allows. Now abuzz with activity, it has come a long way since Sam Walton first sped down the runway in search of new territories to conquer — much like the town he called home.