History of the Museum

AN ABBREVIATED HISTORY OF BAUXITE

The 20ᵗʰ century town of Bauxite, Arkansas, was much like other towns of the same time period. Community life centered around church, school, and sports activities. There was a strong sense of both civic and patriotic pride within the community. Evidence of all these community essentials may be seen in the various rooms of the museum.

However, there was one way the town of Bauxite differed from almost every other town of its day. From its inception until 1969, Bauxite was a company town. The houses were built and owned by the company, and rented to employees of the company. The streets were built and maintained by the company. The water system was owned and operated by the company. The first Bauxite public school was built by the company in 1911. A movie theater, company store, bank, and hospital were also built by the company. Even a community center was built by the company from funds generated by a monthly deduction from each employee based on their earnings. The town also had a police department. The “company” was first known as the Pittsburgh Reduction Company and later the Aluminum Company Of America, and is now known as simply ALCOA.

To understand how Bauxite came to exist, an understanding of the aluminum industry is necessary. British chemist Sir Humphrey Davey, in 1807, theorized that alumina was likely the oxide of a new metal that he named aluminum. The first aluminum metal seen by man was produced by Danish physicist H. C. Oersted in 1825. The French, during the time of Napoleon III, became interested in the metal aluminum due to its potential use in warfare. Their work resulted in finding deposits of alumina-containing ore in the Les Baux province in France. Therefore, the ore containing alumina became known as bauxite.

In 1886, Charles M. Hall, a student at Oberlin College in Ohio, developed the first commercially feasible method to reduce alumina to the metal aluminum. He developed this method working in his father’s workshop. In 1888, Charles Hall met Captain Alfred E. Hunt, and they formed the Pittsburgh Reduction Company.

In 1887, Ed Weigel, a road contractor, was building the Little Rock to Pine Bluff road and noted a crumbly, soft, gray rock along the route in Pulaski County. This rock made a good road base. The State Geologist, John C. Branner, identified the rock as bauxite and, after an investigation of the surrounding areas, noted a second large deposit of bauxite in Saline County, which he reported in 1891.

The first bauxite ore was mined in Saline County in 1896 by the General Bauxite Company, and in 1897, that company built a drying mill and bought extensive bauxite-containing property in Saline County. In January 1899, the Pittsburgh Reduction Company sent John R. Gibbons and his son, J. Felton Gibbons, to Saline County to investigate the bauxite possibilities and obtain options on bauxite-containing property. A lab was set up in Little Rock to analyze the ore, and testing revealed extensive deposits of high-grade bauxite in Saline County. Mr. Hall and Mr. Martin also came to Saline County, and the company began purchasing land in Saline County. The Pittsburgh Reduction Company bought the General Bauxite Company in 1905.

In 1903, the Pittsburgh Reduction Company built a modern ore-drying plant, and that marked the beginning of the town of Bauxite. Laid out on company-owned land, the town soon became a self-sufficient community with schools, churches, stores, roads, medical facilities, a water supply, and other utilities. A post office was also established.

From 1903 until 1942, the company’s operations consisted of mining and drying ore, and the fortune of the community was tied to the economy of the time. Growth and expansion occurred during World War I and the 1920s. A decline occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930s, although a WPA project of $65,000 built a new school that opened in January of 1937.

World War II brought a significant change to the town of Bauxite. Under the direction of the U.S. Defense Plants Corporation, ALCOA built and operated the Hurricane Creek Alumina Refining Plant, and in July 1942, bauxite ore was refined to alumina for the first time in Bauxite. The alumina was then shipped by rail to a reduction plant also built by ALCOA under the direction of the U. S. Defense Plants Corporation at Jones Mills Arkansas, near Malvern and the Remmel Dam hydroelectric plant. At the time, the Hurricane Creek plant was the largest alumina refining plant in the world and employed some four thousand workers. The plant was also designed with both a Bayer process and a sintering process to allow for the processing of lower-grade ore. To house these and other workers, a new subdivision was built in Bauxite by ALCOA and was named Pine Haven. The peak population of Bauxite during World War Il was said to be between six and ten thousand people.

By 1945, the War Production Board reduced the output of the Hurricane Creek plant and eventually closed it two months after V-J Day. In 1946, the federal government sold the Hurricane Creek plant to the Reynolds Metals Company to help settle a Justice Department case against ALCOA that began in 1938 with a claim of unfair competition in the aluminum industry. Reynolds operated the Hurricane Creek plant from 1946 until closing it in 1983.

The town began to decline in the years following World War Il, and company-built houses were bought and moved from the town during the 1950s. By 1950, the population had declined to 2,459, and by 1960, the population had further declined to 885, including the West Bauxite neighborhood. The population decline continued during this time even though ALCOA built a new 54 million dollar alumina refining plant in the Bauxite area in 1952, which it operated until selling the plant in 2004. The company encouraged employees to buy their own homes, and most of the workers lived outside of the town of Bauxite. The 1960s also saw the razing of the Bauxite Theater, the company store, the hospital, and multiple ALCOA office buildings. 

By 1967, only 29 homes were still present in the town of Bauxite, and the company made the decision to shut down the town effective July 1, 1969. 

By then, all that remained in the town were the schools, the community center, the Rock Island Railroad depot, the post office, and the postmaster's house across the street from the community center. Though the company town is gone and the plants were no longer commercially viable given the depletion of higher-grade bauxite, ALCOA still maintains a substantial presence in the area in reclamation and water treatment activities and is still a very large land owner in the area. 

In July 1973, a new town of Bauxite independent of ALCOA was incorporated and remains a thriving community today.