LAFAYETTE COUNTY, Ark.—There are boom-and-bust ghost towns and there are towns that dissipate over decades, slowly wilting away until a place is no longer a place.
Downtown Lewisville is such a place.
The Lafayette County seat has one unplugged traffic light and the three-block span between the police and fire station and county courthouse is a crypt of calcified commerce, clay buffed-brick husks with sagging canopies shading boarded storefronts and empty sidewalks.
Its silence muffles the blow-by throttles of Mack trucks hauling timber in girded flatbeds on nearby Route 82.
“Downtown has been in decline since the 1940s,” Lafayette County Judge Valarie Clark said, noting the courthouse is the only place to get a cup of morning coffee without driving five miles east to Stamps….