Johnny Cash and his family moved into the five bedroom white-washed clapboard house in 1936. (Photo courtesy of City of Dyess)

They come by the busloads from all over the world -- Australia, England, even as far away as Japan -- just to get a look at it and snap a picture of the place where county music legend Johnny Cash spent his youth.

A lot of times he can't understand what the visitors are saying, but he nods and smiles just the same.

Others drive off in a hurry when they see him open the door.

The lucky ones come away with a souvenir, a loose brick or a piece of siding or a branch from one of the cottonwood trees the young Cash planted with his father.

"People want to buy those limbs for souvenirs," Stegall said. "They want those branches because Johnny Cash played on them, or bricks that came out of the house. You'd be surprised."

Aside from the house, which has been altered some over the years, not much remains that is original from Cash's day. Even the cotton which was the staple of the Cash family's existence has given way to soybeans.

Today, Johnny Cash's boyhood home looks much the same as it did in the 1930's. (Democrat photo/Mark Randall)

"A lot of people want to know where the cotton is," Stegall said. "There was a girl who came by from Chicago. I was working on the house. She said 'I'm going to get me some of that cotton.' I never thought much about it. She pulled up two or three big long stalks and put them in the trunk of her car. I didn't tell her it was soybeans."

Stegall takes it all in stride. The house has always attracted fans ever since he bought it in 1971.

He knew he had a famous house, but he and his family never paid it much mind.

"It wasn't as famous as it is now," Stegall said. "But we always had people come by. Nowadays it seems like most of the people come from over the water. They are bigger fans over there (Europe) than they are here."

It was the 2005 movie "Walk the Line" that really put the house at 4791 West County Road 924 on the map.

That's when the tour busses began coming. He and his sons can always tell when the movie has been shown on TV because traffic will pick up again.

"It's been crazy since that movie came out," Stegall's son Christopher said. "We still get a lot of people who stop and look at the sign."

Stegall is more than happy to chat with those who do knock on the door. Sometimes he even invites them inside to look around.

"They want to talk about Johnny Cash," Stegall said. "Because it costs so much money to get here for some, I let them come in the living room. You can't be rude to people like that who drive so far."

To Christopher though, it's just the house he grew up in. His mother and father were Cash fans and had a few of his records, but he didn't listen to country music.

"I knew it was Johnny Cash's home," Christopher said. "But I grew up here. It's just home to me."

Willie has had offers to sell the place. But his sons like it there and he will probably just leave it to them.

"They kind of want to keep it," Stegall said.

He is grateful, though, that people have a newfound appreciation of the singer and his boyhood years spent in Dyess, and likes the idea of building a Johnny Cash museum.

Cashing in

The guest book at the Dyess City Hall reads like a geography lesson. Chillicothe, Ohio. Cadiz, Ky. Tucson, Ariz. Visitors from just about every state from California to Vermont have taken the seven mile detour off Interstate 55 to see the Man in Black's hometown.

And that's not to mention all of the foreign guests who have made the trek from countries like England, Germany, France Australia and Sweden.

Mayor Larry Sims said he gets phone calls from all over the world wanting to know more about Johnny Cash's hometown.

"Walk the Line" put Dyess back on the map.

"People knew who Johnny Cash was," Sims said. "But they don't know a lot about Dyess. They saw the movie and go to researching it and found out it was his hometown."

The town, despite no advertising at all, is still drawing people in three years after the movie's release.

But unfortunately for visitors, there's nothing to see.

The Cash boyhood home is privately owned and still being lived in, and most of the original buildings that were a part of the Dyess Colony are either gone or falling down.

The Dyess Theatre where Johnny Cash used to watch Tex Ritter and Gene Autry movies has mostly fallen down. Only the façade remains. And while the white columned administration building, which at one time was the center of the community, still stands, it is badly in need of restoration.

Sims was able to convince the city council to buy the administration building last year. The plan is to restore it and turn it in to a joint city hall and museum to Johnny Cash complete with an upstairs theatre and a room to showcase the city's history and one for other famous son who also happened to make it big in country music, Gene Williams.

"I just got tired of watching it fall apart and seeing the weeds grow up around it," Sims said. "A lot of people just take it for granted because we live here. And that's sad. It's a beautiful building. It just needs a lot of TLC."

The building earned historical landmark status in 1976. And much of the original craftsmanship still survives including the double wooden floors, large windows and grand staircase.

Williams recently donated $50,000 toward the project and the Cash family has indicated that they are willing to donate memorabilia.

"People from all over the world come here and there is nothing to see," Sims said. "We'd like to give them something to see."

And there is a lot more to Dyess than just Johnny Cash.

The city was one of the first resettlement colonies to come out of the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal and its success was replicated across the country.

Even First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited the town in 1936.

Great Depression drew families to Dyess

Cash was born in Kingsland, Ark. in 1932, but his family moved to Dyess when he was three years old.

Dyess was founded in 1934 as a planned community as part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. The settlement was called an Agricultural Cooperative Project.

W.R. Dyess, a Mississippi County plantation owner who was Arkansas's first WPA administrator, proposed setting up a place where tenant farmers could have a chance to own their own land.

The Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Works Progress Administration got $3 million in federal aid to purchase 16,000 acres of what was then just swampy, uncleared bottom land in Mississippi County for a resettlement colony.

Arkansas was particularly hard hit by the Great Depression. The flood of 1927 followed by drought and then the stock market crash of 1929 and bank failures resulted in about two-thirds of Arkansas's farmers losing their land.

Families who were down and out on their luck and who qualified could receive 20 to 40 acres to homestead in return for clearing and cultivating the land. Candidates had to be white, come from a farming background, be destitute, husband and wife of good moral background and have the ability to do the physical work required to clear the land.

"They didn't just give anybody 20 acres," Sims said. "You had to qualify. They gave it to them with no interest, no payments, no nothing until they got the land cleared and their feet on the ground to where they could start making payments.

"It was a fresh start for a lot of people. And it was hard work. But they were used to hard work."

Construction began on the colony on May, 22 1934. The men dug drainage ditches and built 500 small farmhouses made of white-washed clapboard.

The first 500 families arrived in the autumn of 1934. Each was given a cash advance to buy the land, a new five room house with a barn, privy, chicken coop, mule, cow and enough groceries and supplies to last until the crop came in.

The crops were then sold communally and the profits distributed.

A white columned administration building served as the center of life in the community, but the town later included a bank, barber shop, hospital, service station, hospital, cotton gin, post office, school and movie theater.

Dyess Colony was incorporated in February 1936, one month after the death of Dyess, who was killed in an airplane crash on his way back from Washington, D.C.

The Cash family home

Cash's parents, Ray Cash and Carrie Rivers Cash, were one of five families selected from Cleveland County and arrived in Dyess in 1936.

Cash in his autobiography wrote that Dyess looked like the "Promised Land" to his struggling family.

"A brand new house with two big bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a front porch and a back porch, an outside toilet, a barn, a chicken house and a smoke house, to me, luxuries untold."

Young J.R. as he was called, worked as a water boy on the dredging crew for $3 a day until he was old enough to pick cotton.

After working in the fields during the day, Cash would listen to the radio at night to the Memphis stations with their mix of country and blues songs.

His hometown provided the inspiration for his early hit "Five Feet High and Rising," which recounts the time in 1937 when the levee broke at Wilson and floodwaters came up to the doorstep in front of the house. Residents were evacuated on busses which put them on trains headed to Little Rock.

Cash began writing his own songs by age 12 and sang while in high school on radio station KLCN.

Tragedy struck the family when older brother Jack was killed when he fell onto a radial saw at the Dyess High School shop. Johnny and his mother had a sense of foreboding that something bad was going to happen that day and begged Jack not to go and instead go fishing with his brother. Cash never forgot his brother's death.

He left home after graduating from high school in 1950 to work at a job in Pontiac, Mich., but only stayed at the job for two weeks before returning home. He later enlisted in the Air Force in July 1950.

On Feb. 4, 1968, Johnny Cash returned to Dyess for a special Johnny Cash Homecoming Show at the Dyess High School gymnasium.

A documentary film crew recorded Cash as he drove down the gravel road and over Ditch No. 40 which his father and some of the other men had dug when he served as a water boy, to his boyhood home.

The house was empty at the time. The spot where his mother's stove had worn holes in the floor was still visible.

"We moved in to this house in the winter of 1935," Cash recalled in the documentary. "There were five cans of paint sitting there on the floor. That's all there was here. And every one of us sat down on the floor and cried."

"It sure looks smaller. Doesn't it?"

Sister Louise pointed out where young Johnny used to listen to the radio.

"Every night daddy would say 'turn it down John.' He'd sit there glued to that radio and listen to Hank Snow."

Town sees better days

World War II marked the end of Dyess Colony. Most of the men left to serve in World War II and would never return when the war ended, most having found higher paying work in northern factories.

"They found out there was a life out there where they didn't have to beat their brains out," Sims said.

The town went in to a steady decline.

When Cash returned to Dyess for the homecoming concert, the only original structures remaining on the circle were the administration building and movie theater.

"That's the Dyess Theater where I saw the Tex Ritter movies and Sunset Carson and Gene Autry movies," Cash recalled. "There was a bank, a theater, a big co-op store. There was a nice restaurant there. It was a beautiful little place."

Cash museum planned

Sims believes Dyess can be beautiful once again.

"This whole circle is one of America's treasures," Sims said. "It's going to need a whole lot of work. But the potential is there."

The city has already put a new $60,000 roof on the administration building and is looking for grants to help fund the rest of the project.

The success of the movie led the town to launch Dyess Days in 2006. Williams and other country music artists such as Mickey Gilley, Cash's brother Tommy, and Buddy Jewell, who also has roots in Dyess, have performed benefit concerts to help raise money for the project.

Even W.R. Dyess's family, who now live in California, have expressed an interest in helping the city to restore the memorial to him which sits on the circle across from the administration building.

The entertainer's son, John Carter Cash, paid the city a visit in August 2007. He toured the family home, picked cotton and fished on the banks of the Tyronza River where his father and uncle used to pass the time.

And just this month a Belgian cooking show came to Dyess to film a segment in honor of Cash. It was the show's first visit to the U.S.

"There is still lot of interest in Dyess and Johnny Cash if we can just keep it going," Sims said.

The cost to renovate the administration building and build the museum is about $800,000.

"It doesn't seem like a whole lot of money," Sims said. "But it is for a little town like this."

"It's true that we could build a completely new building for what we have spent on buying the building and putting the roof on. But it wouldn't have the history or the original feeling when people walk in. If we don't do anything, the grass is just going to keep growing up around it. And then what would the circle look like?"

Sims said money generated from the museum could then be used to help pay for other needed projects in the city.

"Johnny Cash is the only thing we've got to help sustain us," Sims said. "We don't have a school. No banks. No factories or anything else. People from all over the world come here and there is nothing to see. But they still want to some and see it. Imagine what we could do if we gave them something to see?

"It takes a big dream and a lot of money. But we don't need to get discouraged just because we don't see it right now."