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Ozarks Notebook: Tyson, the Grinch Who Upended Christmas City [1]
['Kaitlyn Mcconnell', 'The Daily Yonder']
Date: 2023-12-22
Next to a glass window in the Noel Post Office, Dot Harner sits and hand stamps mail with images of holiday wreaths and Christmas trees. The ink-laden rubber stamps continue a more-than-90-year tradition in the small Missouri community that’s only pronounced Noel during the holiday season. The rest of the year, it’s “Nole.”
“It gives me a chance to see all the people I don’t get to see the rest of the year,” she says from her perch alongside the window painted with ornaments and festive greetings.
Dot Harner stamps mail in late November that has already come in for the holiday season. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
This year, the cheerful stamps represent a constant in a town that experienced significant shifts in 2023. In August, Tyson Foods announced that it was shuttering the town’s poultry processing plant, and by October it was closed – eliminating about 1,500 jobs in a town of about 2,100 people.
It leaves a question other communities have faced: What is the next chapter in a place that so heavily relied on one employer for the town’s collective income?
“I can’t say that I’ve never thought about it, but it didn’t really seem like a real danger,” says Terry Lance, the town’s mayor, of the plant’s potential closing. “I mean, after 60 years, they almost become like part of the landscape; part of the furniture. I didn’t expect it. I don’t think anyone really did.”
Noel’s Shifting Identity
Founded in the late 1800s, Noel is a dot on a collection of crossroads. It’s less than five miles from the Arkansas-Missouri state line and about 10 from Oklahoma, and sits along the picturesque Elk River, which meanders along the edge of town.
A banner reminds visitors that they’ve arrived in Noel, the Christmas City. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
Tourists began arriving in Noel at the turn of the 20th century, drawn by natural attractions like the river, distinctive rock overhangs and a collection of show caves – some of which are still open to the public today, proven by signs advertising Bluff Dwellers Cave.
“These enterprises were widely publicized thanks to the efforts of regional booster groups such as the Ozark Playgrounds Association,” notes a publication of the State Historical Society of Missouri. “The construction of US Highway 71 in 1926 helped bring a further increase in tourists and commerce.”
In an attitude in line with Missouri’s “Show Me State” slogan, Noel opted to secede from Missouri in the 1960s after they were left off of a state tourist map. (True story – the few weeks of secession resulted in hastily printed visas, territory signs, costumes and lots of media coverage.)
The Elk River is one of several scenic draws for tourists around Noel. (Photo by Kaitlyn Mcconnel)
It’s also a place that swelled with cultural diversity, in contrast to the rest of the region, which is still largely white. It began with individuals of Hispanic heritage in the ’90s, and their arrival was followed in more recent years by an influx of islanders, Somali and Karen, the latter a group from Myanmar, a local leader says.
In the 2020 U.S. Census, more than 1,450 residents of Noel – nearly 70% of the town’s population – identified as Asian; Black or African American; Hispanic or Latino; or Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander.
That is in contrast with 13% in Springfield, the Ozarks region’s largest city, which has about 170,000 people.
What drew those groups to Noel? For some, it was jobs – ones offered at the plant owned by Tyson, the most recent iteration of poultry processing in Noel. Tyson purchased the plant from competitor Hudson Foods in 1997, a time when the poultry industry began exponential growth.
To provide some context, the headquarters of the corporate giant Tyson are located about 50 miles south of Noel in Springdale, Arkansas, part of the explosion of growth in northwest Arkansas that includes main offices for other large retailers like Walmart and J.B. Hunt.
Despite its proximity and history, in August it was announced that the plant in Noel would close.
By October, it became reality.
The Impact of Closure
I drove to Noel in late November, the first time I was in town since it became known that Tyson would shutter the plant. A handful of vehicles remained in the plant’s parking lot as I drove by. Tyson’s bright-red logos are gone, but discoloration remains.
Since the news broke weeks ago about the plant’s future, I have wondered what this would mean for Noel and the surrounding area. Tyson didn’t represent the only poultry-processing plant in McDonald County, but its closure would be a big change.
Noel is about two hours from where I live, and I still remember the double take I did years ago upon my first visit to town – without knowledge of the immigrant communities – when I saw signs for the African grocery store, a sight I’ve never seen elsewhere in the Ozarks.
In the years since, I have written about a number of the town’s unique elements and have watched with interest as efforts grew to help immigrants acclimate to the Ozarks. One was the start of the Common Cup, a coffee shop on the main drag that opened in 2021 as a way to build bridges among minority communities.
Closure of Noel’s Tyson plant marks a significant change in the McDonald County community, which has been in the poultry business since the 1950s. (Photo by Kaitlyn Mcconnel)
“(We wanted to) bring in people from every different culture and they can have a common place to come together and at least meet each other, or see each other interact, and break down some stereotypes or preconception they might have,” Tony Savage, one of its owners, told me upon its opening two years ago. “Just have a place where everyone feels welcome, and at home, and loved.”
That heartwarming opening was where I also met Joshua Manning, pastor of Community Baptist Church in Noel, which also was home to a number of independent minority congregations. I believe he introduced me to Luke Jesse, who was in the shop and was the pastor of Throne of Praise, a congregation of immigrants from the Marshall Islands that met at Community Baptist.
“We appreciate the opportunity to come and live here,” Jesse told me that day. “It’s really our privilege. I thank God for the U.S. and for freedom.”
Those sentiments echo in today’s significantly different reality. Just weeks after the plant closed, many of the immigrants have already moved away. Jesse and his congregation were some of them; they went to Iowa, Manning says.
“Our Marshall Islands church – one week and they were all gone. The whole church, every deacon, every member. A lot of the Karen population, they went to Arkansas,” says Manning. “The islanders got split – about 50-50 where they went. The Hispanic residents seem to be the ones most likely to stay.
“The Somalian population – I bet they’ll be 100% gone when it’s all said and done.”
Owners of the Common Cup were compelled to leave Noel when the plant closed. Today, the coffee shop is under new ownership, with a new name in a new location, and has shifted to a new menu that doesn’t include the ethnic drinks that were once a key part of its bridge-building efforts.
Another change is at Community Baptist, which closed its doors in late November. The reasons for that are complex – there were ongoing issues tied to funding – but the proverbial straw broke the camel’s back when all the ethnic congregants left.
“Just very quickly, the ability to fund and keep a building open is just…gone,” says Manning, who works at the post office in Lanagan, a town about six miles from Noel.
The church’s closing is a big adjustment for him and his family, who spent seven years overseeing the operation and serving as a connection point for so many different people. It’s also a moment of reflection in a place where community attitudes were not prepared for the influx of new neighbors; a place where Manning says that things have gotten much better, but challenges still exist.
“You had to be able to develop some sense of community within these disparate groups, and within the groups you did OK,” says Manning. “But the bridge between a Caucasian traditional group and the refugee immigrant group, it never coexisted well.”
I ask Lance, Noel’s mayor, his thoughts on where things stand for the community’s future. We visited around a table in the lobby of Noel’s city hall, which is housed along with the municipal court in the town’s former train depot.
Terry Lance is Noel’s mayor. (Photo by Kaitlyn Mcconnel)
The plant’s closure wasn’t anything Noel saw coming, he says.
“I got a phone call from the complex manager roughly an hour before it was made public,” says Lance. “He said that the plant was just not making any money and corporate had decided they were going to shut it down.”
Because so many people have left Noel, the need for jobs isn’t as large as it could have been if everyone stayed in town. However, downstream impacts – housing, restaurants, and the future of the Tyson property – will be widespread and take longer to materialize.
“Losing that many jobs is going to naturally affect every other business in town, from the grocery stores to everyone,” Lance says. “We really don’t know just how much yet. People have moved in, actually at a quicker rate than I was expecting, which I’m thankful for. So maybe it won’t be as bad as we thought, but we could still stand to lose 12 to 15% of our population, at least temporarily. Once again, that’s going to affect every business in town.”
One thing that won’t change is property tax. Tyson didn’t pay any because it doesn’t exist in Noel. In 1969, a devastating explosion involving a freight train caused destruction in the community. As a result, a significant influx of disaster recovery funding led town leaders to eliminate property tax.
Noel’s Future
In the weeks since the plant’s closure, Lance has heard things about what might come next for the plant, which is located in town and very close to the Elk River. The main goal in that next chapter is to protect the town and plan for something better.
Lance says that he’s heard Tyson is in talks with Texas Mineral Solutions, a company that, per its website, focuses on “the upcycling of primary Dissolved Air Flotation (DAF) solids, commonly known as sludge, derived from industrial animal processing wastewater.”
A concern with this idea the potential smell, which not only could affect the quality of life for local residents, but also keep tourists away.
“Now, they claim that they can do it without generating any odor,” Lance tells me. “To say the very least, I’m skeptical. Because I’ve been around it. I understand it is a patented process, and if that’s what it takes, I’m happy to sign a nondisclosure agreement with them, but I want to learn more about this. And you’re going to teach me more about this if you expect me to get on board. “
“They (Tyson) can sell to whoever they want. The only thing that the city has, at least that I’ve been able to figure out yet, is that I think we would have the right to refuse a business license. I think. If they can’t convince me that they can do this without generating odor – even when one part of their process breaks down – I will be against it.”
I reached out to Tyson with questions about plans for the facility but didn’t hear back by the deadline for this column.
Building the Future
In a typical Ozarkian make-do-or-do-without attitude, Lance is looking for the silver lining. Maybe the former plant can simply be torn down, Lance says, and the town can revert to its deeper tourism roots. It’s an industry that saw a strong impact in recent years, although 2023 was lower than during the Covid-19 pandemic when folks wanted to get outside.
For much of that, we’ll have to wait and see, and let it serve as a reminder of what could happen in other rural communities so impacted by few employers.
“I’d try to keep as diverse a job base as possible,” says Lance of advice he’d pass along to other communities. “That’s never necessarily easy for a small town, but I would certainly recommend it, especially after this bomb dropped.”
Up the street, Dot Harner and her team of volunteers commence work on the 30,000 or more cards that will come through the Christmas City’s post office this season. A map of the United States hangs on the wall, with push-pins marking where the festive mail has been sent this year.
As holiday greetings pass through the hands of volunteers who sit and stamp, perhaps wishes for Happy New Year will rub off on Noel through one thing in town that hasn’t changed.
“It’s a tradition, and there’s not that many traditions left,” says Don Spiares, Noel’s postmaster since 2012. “This is important to me.”
Kaitlyn McConnell is the founder of Ozarks Alive, a cultural preservation project through which she has documented the region through hundreds of articles since 2015.
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