Big Time Dreams Dwindle for Arp
With the population decreasing fast, a group of
businessmen in the city took it upon themselves to save the dying town. Former head of chamber of commerce, H.D. Mitchell, approached General Electric about moving the plant site to Arp.Mitchell wrote a letter to the GE Company. In the letter he presented the company with a building site plus home sites for employees, but the offer was denied, because GE already owned the site in Tyler.
After being turned down, the Chamber of Commerce decided to purchase acreage, subdivide it and offer the lots for sale at 1$ each, provide the buyers agreed to build homes for not less than $5,000 within a reasonable length of time.
As a continued effort to attract big business and people, the Arp chamber of Commerce sent a letter to the New York Stock Exchange, after learning about the Exchange’s proposed move to a new location.
As time passed on a letter was received from G. Keith Funston, president of NYSE declining the offer from Arp. Arp offered Wall Street acres of land free to come to the city but the offer was among some 600 other proposals.
In the offer was the Exchange 18 acres located on the main line of the I.G.& N. Railroad and adjacent to highway 135. It was also promised that if the Exchange came to Arp, in addition to the 18 acres, an additional 100 acres would be offered for homes sites of the Exchange employees. The Wall Street proposal caught on fast, now residents in the city were willing to change the any street in town to "Wall Street".
In 1966, Harold and Cleta Nelson operators of the only restaurant of Arp were hopeful of the Stock Exchange coming to Arp that they penciled on their menus, changing them to Nelsons "Wall Street Café Menu". At one time several years ago, the city population reached the 1,000 mark but again residents started leaving and the city population was soon back to normal radius.
From what was started as a sleepy agriculture community, Arp grew into a boomtown with destinations unknown as the growth was racing skyward and it appeared the city was going to become a city comparable to Henderson or Kilgore.
But, the boom was soon a fizzle and the city is now back to its status of a sleepy town, that of a quiet town with no large businesses or industry to cause the hustle and bustle of the larger cities.