Miss Rhoda has pie, too.

You know, sometimes the best things come in small packages. The best pies don’t always come in an eight or nine inch pie shell. And you’re just as likely to find a good pie at a hole in the wall restaurant as at a five-star eatery.

At Rhoda’s Famous Hot Tamales in Lake Village, those pies come in tart shells. But they pack just as much of a punch as a slice of a big pie.
Now, you can order a big full-size pie from Miss Rhoda, if you like. But if you’re just dropping in for a hot plate lunch or a coffee can full of tamales, the little pies will do you just fine.
That’s just what we did on our way down to New Orleans last week. My traveling companion and I left Little Rock extra early to pick up a few assignments here and there.

We arrived at Rhoda’s right around lunchtime and the joint was packed. The parking lot was packed. There were people sitting outside to eat and a line inside the door. That’s how good those tamales are.

We’d already eaten once that day (and you’ll find out more about that meal soon) but had saved just enough room for the pie we were there to check out. Seeing the little pies on the counter was a relief; no oversized slices here. Best of all, each pie was a buck.

I almost got the one little half-and-half pie of the bunch, a pecan-and-sweet-potato beauty. But what sort of service would that have been to you? I have to try them all out and make sure I recommend the best one of the lot.

We tried three of the pies -- the chocolate meringue, the pecan and the sweet potato. The chocolate meringue was a nice filling chocolate custard with a tacky meringue top, sticky and gooey in all the right ways but not fluffy like most meringues. It was tasty, but still not the star of the show. That was so hard to determine. The sweet potato pie has its own renown, and I know why. It’s a firm, not-too-sweet made-from-the-real-deal pie with just a bit of fibrous potato left in the mix. There’s no doubt you’re eating a sweet potato pie when you bite into it.

The crust is supple and buttery. The consistency is firm. The sweetness is measurable. It’s a good filling little pie.

But the real star is the pecan pie -- a rich, deep color custard with a hint of butter and bourbon overtones. It’s meaty and a little cloying, but for its size it’s perfect, bigger than the pie shell goodness.

There’s a depth to each bite, that combination of good Karo-nut syrup and fresh shelled pecans. It’s the not-to-be-missed star of the bunch.

Now all this time we’d been in the restaurant, my photographer had been shooting around, and Miss Rhoda wanted to know why.

We told her it’s what we do, taking photos of food and sharing them with people. She let us shoot the unsteamed tamales all ready to go. She let us shoot around the inside the restaurant. She even posed for us in her kitchen. She’s one hell of a dame, and we owe her some photographs.



Of course we ordered tamales -- we left with a sack of a dozen to take on the road with us. The intention had been to have a sit-down closer on the road to New Orleans. However, a barge had struck the I-20 bridge at Vicksburg, and we were left sitting in a parking lot in Mound, LA waiting to cross.


It was a shade cool, it was late afternoon and the only food in site was a pub on the north side of the interstate and a convenience store on the south. So we dug into the bag, pulled out the paper-wrapped package, tucked it open and pried open the aluminum foil. There we found those sweaty corn-husk-wrapped beauties, steamy and soft, softer than even I’ve ever had them in the store. Lacking the appropriate plastic ware, we took turns pulling out husks and sliding messy fingers along them, pushing out the soft tamales and eating them like, well, like Push-Up orange sherbet pops. I am not afraid to say I sucked the shucks. A roll of paper towels kept us from totally desecrating the interior of the vehicle.


I tell you, I’ve had tamales many places, I’ve had Miss Rhoda’s tamales more than a time or two -- but they never tasted better.

You’ll find Rhoda’s Famous Hot Tamales at 714 St. Mary’s Street in Lake Village, a couple blocks off U.S. 65. I’ve talked about those tamales before and chances are I will again. Now you know you need to try those pies, too. (870) 265-3108.

Pacing the bridge.

Back in my TV days, there was rarely a notice of any sort of week gone by where we didn’t hear something along the lines of “yep, barge hit the Highway 82 bridge at Greenville again.” Usually this was followed by the line “and the barge sank.” Sometimes we heard “the bridge has been temporarily closed for inspection.” And it would close, but never for long.

The Greenville crossing’s very important to commercial travel. It’s a quicker route across the river for travelers and trucks heading down Highway 65 from Little Rock into points south and east (especially to Jackson or New Orleans).

But damn that bridge has been scary. I’ve had my share of times going over it, sometimes during the day but usually in the late evening or at night. The idea of being far above the Mississippi for that long is scary enough -- but when it’s dark and you’re meeting an 18-wheeler going the other way, you count your blessings on your fingers and toes and grip the steering wheel, praying for a quick end to the madness. The end always came, of course, after crossing the long approach on the other side.

Only once did I have to start backing up on that bridge, and thank heavens it was full daylight. Must have been spring of 2006. I was heading south with the hubster, and we were up the Lake Village approach already and about to get honestly out over the river. That’s when we saw a flash. The car in front of us stopped, right there, and those reverse lights came on. We managed to get stopped before he could reach us, and he started blowing his horn. The flash went right past us -- a pickup with a WIDE LOAD sign on it. I looked in the rearview, saw no one coming, and eased the Durango I was driving into reverse.

There it was, coming around the bend in the approach, a foolhardy truck driver hauling half a mobile home. What the hell? The guy in front of me was honking, and I had to go back. There was no choice.

My husband was cussing a blue streak. He turned around and attempted to guide me back right. I was doing okay with my rear view and side mirrors for some time, but once we hit the approach I turned the wheel and got us perpendicular to the road. The little car that had been in front of us sped by in reverse continuing down the ramp. I remember making the rest of that three point turn with inches to spare, then hearing the horn of the oncoming truck, as if we’d been in the wrong for attempting the crossing.

After that, we headed back down into Lake Village and found the Pizza Hut and sat there quivering over iced tea and pasta for a little while before heading south on Highway 65 instead.

There’s no doubt a new bridge was needed -- the old one had a width of just 24 feet, no shoulders, nowhere to go if anything crazy happened. Just two lanes of traffic -- one in each direction -- carrying a national highway over one of the fattest stretches of the Mississippi River. Nothing else between Natchez and Helena. I was thrilled when I heard about a new bridge being built, and over the past few years passing through I watched as bits of it got built here and there. In fact, the last time I made the crossing was in March of 2008 on my way back from New Orleans. At that point you could tell there was a bridge deck and most of the overhead cable work had already been done.

I’ve tended to just head south on 65 to Tallulah my few trips that way since then, opting to catch stories at Transylvania and Lake Providence and such and head through Vicksburg on my way through to Jackson rather than the Greenville-Indianola route. But word that the new bridge had just opened drew me that way this past weekend, and it’s part of the reason Grav and I made the journey south when we did. We both knew it might be our last chance to see the old bridge while it was still standing. And we’re both curious people.

So on that hot Friday afternoon, with me full of tamales and Grav looking for a bite, we set off for Greenville. We had ulterior motives -- I recalled a root beer joint across the way and it sounded like a good place to pop in and let him fill his tank while I enjoyed a frosted mug.

The approach was quite different -- rather than the long standing S curve that headed to the more northerly approach of the old bridge, the roadbed rolled smoothly straight ahead to the elevated section that started climbing at The Cowpen. The big white stretch lay ahead of us, startlingly bright in the mid-afternoon sun, the cables overhead forming shadows that didn’t quite darken any bit of the way. It was a smooth ride, lofty and high.

The disappointment for us was this tall barrier in the center of the road, which wouldn’t allow for us in a car to be able to see over it. This wasn’t going to do.

We spent a short time in Greenville, completely missing the root beer stand and tolerating a less than excellent Chinese buffet before heading back, spotting said root beer stand (which had no sign) and briefly stopping to shoot an old overgrown junior high football field. Then it was back on the road and down to the river.

Being on the Mississippi side, though, we were hoping to get some sort of final view of the old bridge. We took the “exit” next to the casino and drove the old road out as far as we could go before arriving at series of “Road Closed signs.” The first was set just on the left side of the road, so we approached further. We actually made it up to the gate at the westbound approach before we stopped.

There was a small black car that had followed us up to the point. The “Road Closed” sign was once again on the left hand side and the gate was open. We deliberated driving on, but knowing the bridge was set for dismantlement shuddered at the thought of discovering holes where the roadbed had been taken out. We thought about parking and walking it on foot; but the knowledge that the full bridge was over ten thousand feet from end to end and that the temperature had already surpassed 100 degrees cut that out. In the end, we made a three point turn and briefly stopped a distance away to see what the other driver was going to do.

We watched as he paused at the gate, nosing through a bit. And then he too turned around to head out.

Well, that was that. No one was going to be crazy enough to get back up on the old bridge. And probably for good reason. I mean, the old bridge had just been closed a few days (this being August 6th, and the new bridge having opened on the 4th) and it might have been okay, but there was just a little too much danger for our nerves there.

We headed back to the highway and turned right to head back into Arkansas on the new bridge. We’d made it almost to the point of the first cable stays when Grav asked me to stop. I threw on the hazards, rolled onto the nicely wide shoulder and he still had room to open his door fully. He got out, made a few motions indicating he would be a moment, and started to shoot.

The old bridge is still sitting there, dark against the horizon to the north, overshadowed in spirit and soon to be nothing but a ghost. Rather than imploding the bridge, it’s going to be disassembled bit by bit. This one last romantic glance back was an afternoon’s lazy goodbye.

Once on the other side, we did look for easy access to the riverside so we could take a few more shots, but after a while we gave up.

The next day we went out to Lakeport Plantation and spent four hours learning all about the restored 1859 home, the only remaining Antebellum home still standing along the Mississippi River in Arkansas and the northernmost of the surviving river plantation homes. It’s being restored by Arkansas State University and a crack team of researchers, restoration experts and archaeologists (be sure to read more here at Tie Dye Travels).

While we were there, we were told about Mount Holly, a deserted plantation not too far south of Greenville between the river and Highway 1, and we decided the afternoon wouldn’t be complete without a visit (this killed our opportunity to visit the Crossland Zoo in Crossett, but that’ll be something for another time).

We were headed out from the plantation when Grav asked me to stop. He caught the bridge towering over the plantation in this magical shot. Hard to imagine that it’s more than half a mile away.

And then we were off the county roads and onto 82 and crossing again. And it was such a pretty day, that once more we stopped on the bridge. This time, Grav was looking to shoot the new kid in town. He made me nervous playing in traffic, running across to the median to capture shots there of the magnificent cables above.

This bridge is something else. It’s the longest cable-stayed bridge span along the Mississippi and the fourth longest in North America. There’s all sorts of great details about it on the great website for the bridge. I encourage you to check it out.

And then we were done, and Grav got back in the car for our trip to find Mount Holly Plantation. Which we did. It was about three when we crossed the bridge the final time on the trip, headed for our next stop of interest in El Dorado. The new bridge gleamed brightly, and I looked out one more time to see the dark spectre that for the slightest time remains the old bridge. It’s been here since 1940. It won’t be here next time I come through.

Note: The photos of the bridge at the beginning of the piece were taken by my friend David Backlin, who has been hunting bridges and tracking down old highways for years. Check out more of his fabulous shots of the old and new Greenville bridges at his website, The Road Less Taken.

You can learn more about the history of the old Greenville bridge and the construction of the new one at this MDOT website.

And to really appreciate Grav's magnificent panorama shot of the old Greenville bridge with the barge below, please click here. It deserves to be seen in better scale.

Restoring an Antebellum Wonder.

I’ve heard a good deal about the restoration at Lakeport Plantation over time. Have you? Maybe not. I tend to seek out these sort of things, though, so I can share them with you.

I do recall the place being gifted to Arkansas State University back in 2001 by the Sam Epstein Angel family, and that there was a whole lot of work to be done. Turns out, years of work. I mentally made myself a note that someday I’d go see what the hubbub was about and determine for myself if it was as worthy as so many other of the magnificent homes I’ve visited these past few years.

I went on a Saturday morning with my photographer Grav Weldon to chronicle our visit. We did have to wait a bit -- the approach from US 82 is a paved country road, and farm crews were harvesting corn with machinery and loading said corn into bin wagons on the roadway. It wasn’t an especially long stop, though, and it didn’t take much searching to find the signs leading us to the plantation.

The snappy yellow house with its white trim, blue shutters and green ironwork can be seen peeking up over the fields of cotton around it. If you approach on a clear day you can also see the new US 82 bridge rising at angles in the deeper blue sky to the north. The scene is something very old and something very new, 150 years of separation between them.

Across the small parking lot from the plantation house lies a manufactured building, inside which are housed the staff and many of the items explaining the restoration. We met with two ladies, Sarah and Claudine, who were the only people we saw on staff there that day. They both immediately started giving us information about the house and its history, obviously very passionate about the story they have to share. I like that.

We learned a lot of things about the house. While it originates from 1859, the land it’s on has operated as a plantation since the 1831. It’s passed through a few hands but not all that many, starting with the Johnson family. The patriarch, Joel, left behind a wife and five children in Kentucky to forge his own path in the wilds of Arkansas. When he died in 1846, his son Lycurgus became the estate’s administrator, but it took more than ten years to settle everything out. In the end, the property went to Lycurgus and his wife Lydia and it’s believed that’s when Lakeport Plantation saw its first construction.

The plantation went to Lydia when Lycurgus died in 1876, and was administered under her son Theodore and son-in-law Isaac Washington until just before 1900, when it fell to the youngest surviving son, Victor Johnson. Doctor Johnson kept the plantation working and moving for many years until he uprooted the family and moved to Greenville, MS in 1927. At that point, the property went to the Epsteins, who held onto it until its donation.

There’s a whole lot of history there, and it’s so much better shared by Tom DeBlack from Arkansas Tech University (my alma mater), who probably knows more about that plantation than I know about food. I will defer to his greater knowledge, which is so kindly shared both on the Lakeport Plantation website and in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a resource with much merit that I encourage you to plunder for its repository of grand information.

But I digress.

Sarah took diligent time in making sure we knew about the efforts to restore Lakeport Plantation to its original grandeur. Unlike so many of the other restored Antebellum and Civil War-era homes I have seen over time, this facility is not packed with reproductions and “what ifs” and items unbefitting a museum-quality structure. She shared with us the painstaking diligence that went into each section of the restoration -- which explains why it took more than five years before the facility was opened to the public. It’s not done yet, by the way. There are so many little projects to complete in the home itself, and a series of buildings that will be constructed for classroom purposes as well.

Anyway… we saw many things, including actual nails from the site, a cross-section of roofing shingles and copper gutters that adorn the house, a replica cast iron piece that was mocked-up to go on the house but which weren’t needed because original era cast iron was discovered. I took particular interest in the 14-color process canvas floor coverings being restored by Becky Witsell. They’re currently housed separately. It’s amazing to see just how vibrant they are today. The floor cloths have taken generations of foot traffic yet somehow Witsell’s been able to bring them back and make them ever more vibrant than they already were.

Sarah also pointed out the magnificent ceiling medallions. At the welcome center there are photos of one of the medallions showing its previous condition, painted a funky gold. On entering the plantation house itself, it was one of the first things I noticed, perfectly restored above us.

The house itself is something to see. The front pathway has been restored with hand-cast bricks, but along the sides you can still see the original brickwork, worn but still marking the way. Up the somewhat steep steps to the porch, and the giant door looms. It’s a painted door, by the way, as are the many mantles inside the house, painted with that particular artistry common then (and now, it seems, looking at DIY programs) of faux finishes resembling wood on the doors and marble on some of the mantlepieces.

The front hall itself surprised me. Having been in many older homes like this, I was expecting a greeting stairwell in a hallway that would open up to rooms on either side. The hall at Lakeport Plantation is wide, as if to invite one in to sit inside. Parlors open up to each side, each with its own fireplace and windows looking out onto the cotton fields. There’s very little in these rooms or the hall; the folks who restored the plantation made what I considered to be a very wise decision, to restore back the plantation to its original era and not to clutter it with anything that wouldn’t have been found in 1859.

One thing that is in the house is an antique and unusual square grand piano in its music room. Built in 1869 by the J. A. Gray Company, it spent 60 years housed in the old Epstein Cotton Gin before being dug out and sent to Bradshaw Piano Service in Conway for restoration. In fact, the piano hasn’t been back long; it was returned to the home June 14th of this year. Though it was pretty much forgotten all those years, the keys survived intact -- in fact, just one of the wooden keys needed a new ivory veneer.

We explored the first floor rooms, including a men’s room that was likely a family parlor for less social settings. Past the rooms connected to the front of the hallway, the doors are shorter and have windows overhead that ratchet out for air flow even when the windows are closed.

We ventured upstairs. Here the rooms weren’t painted. The trim is pink in two of the bedrooms including the master. There’s a small nursery from which you can see a small crypt out the window to the gardens. The crypt itself was restored a few years back as part of the project.

The master bedroom was one of the few rooms that actually contained furniture -- a small vanity with towel rack, a fold out desk/dresser and a magnificent four poster bed that actually had springs in it instead of the rope suspension often seen in its era. I really liked that it wasn’t covered with mattress and linens; I could see the bones of the room, of the house, and could really feel what it was all about.

There’s even one room upstairs that’s still down to its original plaster, imagine that. The creases and such from the plastering process 150 years ago is still there and visible to this day.

We went back downstairs and checked out a few more rooms, including the old store. In this shelf-lined room you can read pencil-scrawled inscriptions that tell you where each item was kept and oftentimes how much it cost. There are a selection of bottles contemporary to the property on display, but for the most part it is bare. There’s one section where rice was kept where you can see what inflation does, with penciled-in prices starting at a nickel and working up from there.

The next room back was the coldest -- the former kitchen, a rarity being attached to the main house as it were. There’s still an old weathered butcher block in the center of the room, and an old pre-manufactured iron stove that’s… well, you just need to go there to get the story. I found it neat and impressive.

Out the back where the kitchen wing lies is a gigantic cistern. Years ago this was used for storing rainwater captured in gutters and piped down from the top of the house. It was very large and very deep. It’s not in use now, though, been filled in with sand. Back in the day this would have been the primary water source (far less contaminated with debris and the like than water from the Big Muddy nearby).

We went through the kitchen and out the back to a small porch. There’s an old dairy that is next on the “let’s explore and discover!” list that is still mostly untouched, and to the right of it what’s called The Smokehouse. That’s a magnificent idea. On the place where the original smokehouse stood another building has been erected, but instead of wood and meat there’s electrical and cooling equipment inside. This, to me, is genius. Rather than cut holes in the house and put in a modern (and obtrusive) climate control system, the system was constructed outside in this building and lines were run underground into the house. The vents run up into the attic and down the many fireplaces into each room, keeping the whole house appropriately chilled or heated and cutting the humidity. Genius!

We entered another room off the back porch. This room is believed to have been Dr. Victor Johnson’s office. It’s sparse but decorated with a bench found in the dairy recently. The plasterwork has been repaired and painted throughout except for one small section intentionally left original under the window. It is without a doubt the coldest room in the house.

The tour of the house all but complete, Sarah took us out to look at the exterior. Grav was taking photos of the ironwork on the porches when she mentioned to me about the bees. Yes, bees. This immediately put Grav on defense -- he hates bees -- but my curiosity was piqued.

Sarah showed us the tree where the bees had been making their home for generations (human generations, at that), a bowed out old cedar to the northeast of the house. There they were, hundreds of bees quietly humming in the afternoon heat. They didn’t bother us and we didn’t bother them.

We knew it was time to go, and were kind of surprised when we found we’d been at the plantation for nearly four hours. Besides, Grav and I had been given an idea whilst we were there, and we wanted to go check it out.

After making our salutations, we headed back over the Greenville bridge and connected in with Highway 1, headed for Old Washington. Sarah had sketched us out a rough map of where we were supposed to go, but I believe we accidentally left it behind because I could not for the life of me find it in my bag.

We’d progressed quite a place, egging each other on to go a little further, the whole “we’ve come this far, why stop now?” argument slowly losing traction. We knew we were in Washington County but there was no indication that we were anywhere near where we needed to be. Finally, our frustration convinced us to pull into a small RV park with a sign advertising “Bait and Thangs.” We weren’t sure what “thangs” were going to be in there (but later found out “thangs” are beverages and Little Debbie snack cakes) but it was a place to turn around.

There was just something, though -- the cypress, maybe, an old bridge… we pulled on through and turned left and drove along the river. And there, not a quarter mile past the RV park, was an old quiet red brick lady staring out cock-eyed over Lake Washington, an old ox-bow off the Mississippi. She’d seen a lot of wear. This, my friends, was Mount Holly Plantation.

We know some about her -- that she was built around 1855, contemporary to Lakeport Plantation, and that she was probably built for Margaret Johnson Erwin, who was Lycurgus Johnson's first cousin. We know that a gentleman bought the property years ago with plans to turn it into a B&B. But what we saw was sad and shocking. Though the exterior brick was mostly fine, many of the windows are missing, the structure is corroded and covered with webs and flora, and it stinks. I mean, it really stinks. We walked by some places where the windows were broken (and one where a door was standing wide open) and could smell the filth. Our guess -- teenagers who’d found some place interesting to hang. A shame.

Grav and I want to find out more about Mount Holly. I think everyone really does. The floor plan seems similar to Lakeport Plantation and out back towards Highway 1 there’s a grand alley of old oaks still standing. It’d be nice to see this plantation taken on as a project like Lakeport and hopefully restored to its beauty.

You can find Lakeport Plantation south of Highway 82. Turn south when you see the sign for The Cowpen and take State Highway 142 two miles south. You’ll see the sign that points to the gravel road on the left; more likely, you’ll see the yellow house from the road and follow your common sense. Check out the website. There are tours Monday through Friday at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., and also Saturdays through the first week of September. Admission is five dollars. It’s a deal. (870) 265-6031.

More interesting Lake Village area stops:
Breakfast: JJ’s Lakeside Café. If you like a good veggie omelet, give the Bean Boy Omelet a try. Watch out for the jalapenos -- they’re almost as hot as the boiling-hot coffee.
Lunch: Rhoda’s Famous Hot Tamales. Get three, six, or twelve -- heck, take a coffee can full home with you for later. Smooth, meaty, slightly spicy tamales made from beef and chicken and a lot of chicken fat. Won’t do any favors for your waist, but you’re not in Lake Village to diet.
Dinner: The Cowpen. The steaks are highly touted, but we found the best deal on the menu to be the Chip & Dip - large portions of Rotel cheese dip, grilled-onion flavored bean dip and cumin-laced salsa served up with freshly deep fried tortilla chips for just $6.95 and more than you could make a meal on.

And of course, check out the new US 82 Highway Bridge.

* Watch Kat's segment about this article from her August 12th appearance on KARK Today at Noon by following this link. *