Rural Lafayette County, with one-third its 1930s population, braces for impact as the epicenter of a rapidly intensifying global rush for lithium.
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.
The former circuit court clerk is in her first four-year term as county judge, which in Arkansas’ municipal government structure makes her the elected county executive and non-voting chair of a nine-seat quorum court, similar to a county commission.
A lifelong Lafayette County resident, Clark, 48, has seen her county—smallest of the 75 in Arkansas and third least-populous—bleed out people for decades.
“There were 10,000 people here about 20 years ago, 6,100 now,” she told The Epoch Times in late September, her estimates confirmed by United States Census records that chart diminishing demographics since its peak in the mid-1930s, when nearly 18,000 lived in Lafayette County.
In fact, fewer people now live in this rural nook of Arklatex—Texas 30 miles west, Louisiana 30 miles south—than in the 1890s. Lewisville’s 867 residents and Stamps’ 1,200 population in 2024 are far less than their 1920 headcounts.
Beginning in 2000, Clark said, the area’s furniture industry closed and 600 jobs left. Alan White Furniture was “the last to shut its door” in 2005, prompting collateral shuttering of sawmills that supported the region’s loblolly and shortleaf pine lumber industry.
But a reversal of Lafayette County’s century-long fade may be afoot or, better said, underfoot.
There’s a “white gold” rush in Arklatex, a high-stakes global race to extract battery-grade lithium from the Smackover Formation’s arch across Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas.
The epicenter of this contest is in Lafayette County, with ground zero running through the desiccated, deserted streets of downtown Lewisville.
“We’re a little flower,” Clark said. “We’re about to bloom.”
Stealth in the Smackover
Lithium powers high-tech electronics, a critical mineral in manufacturing lightweight lithium-ion rechargeable batteries for iPhones, computers, electric vehicles, solar panels, and utility-scale electricity storage.
Domestic manufacturers import nearly 30 percent of what they need—mostly from China, which exports up to 90 percent of materials required for lithium-ion batteries worldwide, according to the United States Energy Information Administration.
Lithium is produced through hard-rock mining or brine extraction. Smackover Formation brines—concentrated saltwater in a sea trapped for more than 150 million years below a limestone band that stretches from Florida’s panhandle into east Texas—have all the right ingredients, and the right history.
A century ago, some of the world’s most productive oil fields tapped Smackover’s Arklatex span. Pumpjacks—now mostly rusting relics—still dot fields framed by yellow pine and bayou bottom hickories.
Small refineries separated petroleum from Smackover brine, discarding “waste stream” lithium, iodine, and magnesium, while retaining bromine, extracting the halogen liquid for applications ranging from medications to fire retardants, pesticides, and photography.
Arkansas is the world’s largest source of bromine, with North Carolina-based Albemarle Corp. and Germany’s Lanxess operating plants in the region.
So it made sense geologists were testing wells for lithium density across Lafayette County’s landscape of “timber, cattle, and chickens,” former County Judge Danny Ormand said.
Yet it was done in stealth. “I later learned they’d been scouting the area since 2017—no one knew they were here,” he told The Epoch Times.
A longtime local fixture, Ormand has served as Stamps Fire Chief, Lafayette County Sheriff, and Arkansas Crime Information Center Director. He retired in 2012 before winning election in 2018 as county judge. He’s now Clark’s assistant after she succeeded him in 2022.
He remembers the day in 2019 when the “lithium boom” officially began. “I was watching Fox News one morning and they announce the largest lithium deposit in the country … in Lafayette County,” Ormand said. “I thought, ‘What are they talking about?’”
“We estimate there’s enough dissolved lithium present in that region to replace U.S. imports of lithium and more,” survey hydrologist Katherine Knierim said.
‘Uncharted Waters’
When Clark ran for county judge in 2022, she knew lithium development “was a great opportunity, for sure.”
But the science—and global corporations involved—can be intimidating, she acknowledged.
“I took chemistry class in high school. I should have paid more attention,” Clark said. “We’re dealing with companies we never dealt with before, managing uncharted waters.”
In December 2023, Australia’s Pantera Lithium acquired Daytona Lithium’s Superbird Lithium Brine Project, which encompassed 35,000 Lafayette County acres. The acreage was purchased in July by EnergyX, a lithium technology startup backed by General Motors.
In early 2023, Texas-based Exxon Lithium purchased mineral rights to 120,000 acres in Lafayette and Columbia counties and in November 2023 announced the drilling of its first lithium well. It plans to begin production in 2027.
Albemarle, which operates two bromine plants in Columbia County, east of Lafayette County, is working on lithium extraction.
Smackover Lithium—a joint venture between Canada-based Standard Lithium and Norway’s state-owned Equinor Energy—may be furthest along.
Backed by Koch Industries, it has a demonstration project in Lanxess’s bromine plant near El Dorado—“Eldo Rada” in Arkansan—and test wells across Arklatex.
In March, the company opened an office on Lewisville’s Route 82–Route 29 intersection, next to an abandoned gas station.
Dealing with corporate giants is a boon for the area but also a challenge, she said. Smackover Lithium is “good at letting us know what’s happening. Exxon is a different kind of animal,” Clark said, calling the corporate giant and others “not real forthcoming.”
“We get a lot of, ‘We can’t answer that question’” from corporate newcomers, she said. “Everything that glitters is not gold.”
Wrestling With Re-Industrialization
Arkansas state Rep. Matt Duffield, a Republican, is in Lewisville to learn how state legislators can team up with undermanned local governments to manage Smackover’s re-industrialization.
“Arkansas is eclectic with different things happening in different parts of the state,” he told The Epoch Times. “I’m curious to see what’s happening in southwest Arkansas.”
Duffield, who serves Russellville, is careful to say he’s cleared this foray into colleagues’ legislative districts, noting that state Rep. Wade Andrews is “a firefighter on duty” and Sen. Steve Crowell, a developer, has other obligations.
“For southern Arkansas to have this opportunity, it’s exciting for the whole state,” he said.
Duffield, 42, got 75 percent of the November 2024 vote to win a second term representing his northwest Arkansas district, which includes a nuclear power plant.
Unlike most of the nation’s 7,400 state lawmakers, he may not need a full-time job to support his part-time legislative duties.
In 2001, he launched a 20-plus year career as Matt Riviera, professional wrestler and promoter, and graduated from Harding University with a broadcast journalism degree in 2006.
Among highlights inside-and-outside the ring was being a National Wrestling Alliance World Tag Team champion.
Duffield said he’s also “a C-list actor.”
But now it’s back to basics, to family roots as “an aggregate guy—fourth-generation sand, gravel, dirt,” he said. His great grandfather was a state senator in the late 19th century who tried to shoot a Little Rock newspaper editor but his pistol jammed, he added.
“We need fair and equal representation for you guys,” Duffield said, citing estimates that Smackover lithium could generate “$19.1 trillion over 20 years. That’s a lot of money.”
The $19 trillion estimate is in constant flux and influenced by machinations that include the Chinese Communist Party flooding markets with processed lithium to drive down prices and dissuade development in the United States, Canada, Chile, and Australia. In 2022, a metric ton of lithium was selling for as much as $82,000; in 2025, the price was as little as $8,300 per metric ton.
‘There’s Nothing Here’
The Stamps Rotary Club meets monthly in a Lafayette County High School gym after eating lunch—this day, chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, mixed greens, salad, sugar cookies—in the cafeteria with its teenaged students.
Tommy Goodwin, the Lafayette County Press’s “one-man show,” is covering the meeting, even if it’s only about planning a banquet.
“I do all the city council meetings, county quorum meetings,” Goodwin said. “I do special events, criminal court on Friday mornings, circuit court, Lafayette County School Board, and high school football—home games, at least.”
He’s a reporter by default. He owned a Stamps print shop when he met Lucy, who has a creative writing degree, online. The relationship flowered into their 1997 marriage.
Moving to Stamps, “She said, ‘This place needs a newspaper.’ I said, ‘I don’t know nothing about it.’ She said, ‘Well, let’s try it.’ So we did in 1997 and never looked back,” Goodwin said.
Lucy had a stroke and can no longer report. Now it’s his job to deliver often-grim news—such as the Sept. 23 Lafayette County School District Annual Title 1 meeting that verified enrollment had declined by 22 students from the 2024 school year.
“It’s now 398,” Goodwin said, adding the subsequent loss of $32,000 in Title 1 funding “is big money in a small place like this.”
In 2003, the district had more than 900 students. In 2023, 516 attended its 7th to 12th grade high school and lone elementary school.
It’s all going away, like his print shop, said Goodwin. He was born and raised in Stamps, childhood home of the late-United States poet laureate Maya Angelou, and immortalized in “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.”
“Stamps used to bustle on Saturday morning,” he said. “You couldn’t hardly get downtown for people shopping at the shoe store, dress shop, dime store. All gone now. There’s nothing here. Dollar General, you know?”
Downtown Stamps has a drug store, a maybe-open pizza shop, a mural with an Angelou tribute, and a new bank framing a triangle-shaped parking lot as empty as it is odd.
Goodwin is “sort of a skeptic” about lithium dramatically changing the area’s dynamics.
Building plants could create hundreds, maybe several thousand, construction jobs. But once operational, “each plant’s only employing around 100 people,” he said.
Director of Operational Excellence
There should be a parade through Lafayette County in November when Tetra Technologies hauls a 140-foot titanium tower to its 6,953-acre Evergreen Brine Unit south of Stamps, plant general manager Sarah Palazzi said.
“It will be a sight to see,” she said, adding the tower—a wellbore injection head—was on another Tetra property “so it’s always nice to have a giant piece of titanium in your pocket. It definitely helps your economics.”
As Tetra’s director of operational excellence, the chemical engineer’s enthusiasm could shine in sales for the Texas-based corporation.
Founded in 1981, Tetra has been producing “completion fluids,” solvents pumped down oil/gas wells to prevent blow-outs, from Arkansas bromine since the early 1980s. In 1992, it built a West Memphis, Arkansas, refinery using bromine from the Lanxess’s El Dorado plant.
But all along, Tetra was buying Smackover mineral rights. It now holds 40,000 “undeveloped brine acres” in Lafayette and Columbia counties and is poised to get into extraction.
It’s also developing its 20,854-acre Reynolds Brine Unit south of Lewisville, a partner project with Smackover Lithium.
Evergreen has Palazzi buzzed. In 2021, New Jersey-based Eos Energy agreed to purchase Tetra’s zinc bromine solution for its Znyth aqueous zinc battery, ideal for delivering mobile power to remote areas without electricity.
“We’re in the ‘green’ sector, just in a completely different market,” Palazzi told Duffield, Clark, and Ormand. “The other really cool thing about these batteries is, say we have some massive natural disaster and have no power infrastructure, they can put these on an 18-wheel flatbed and power up whatever needs to be powered up.”
Tetra won’t just extract lithium. “The brine is so rich, so full of so many different minerals,” she said, including iodine, magnesium, and manganese, also critical minerals.
Building Evergreen will require 300 workers and operating it will create 30 to 50 full-time jobs, “depending on what mineral we go after” when production begins by early 2028, Palazzi said.
An Arkansas native and University of Arkansas graduate, she said the project is one of many addressing “a state issue.”
“Making sure kids who grow up in Arkansas can stay in Arkansas. Bring industry to Arkansas. Keep industry in Arkansas,” she said.
‘Got to Get This Right’
Smackover Lithium Arkansas Administrator Valarie Smith is manning the Lewisville office on Rt. 82 under a Smackover Lithium billboard, one of few along the highway that isn’t blank.
A Standard Lithium community relations manager, she works in the Lewisville office Tuesdays through Thursdays.
There are cubicles with empty desks behind a lobby partition. Most staff work at the El Dorado plant, now idle for maintenance, she said.
Smith said next is “the FID step,” the final investment decision on proceeding with the South West Arkansas Project. She expects it by “late December, early January.”
“We’re super excited. We don’t see an issue in getting a final investor decision,” she said.
The company will need 300 workers to build and at least 106 employees to operate the plant seven miles south of Lewisville.
For now, Smith is Smackover Lithium’s face in Lewisville.
But new faces are coming.
“When all this hit in the Smack, it was exactly what we were hoping for,” Clark said, but she worries after hearing 1,000 laborers are coming soon to work for Exxon, although the company hasn’t confirmed such plans.
“There’s not enough places to eat—Dollar Generals all over” but no fast-food restaurants, and “not enough housing, motels,” she worries, adding the area’s only motel—Jet Motor Lodge in Stamps—reopened in 2024 after being vacant for a decade.
Clark worries about “making sure this gets done right” in ensuring locals secure careers through programs developed by the University of Arkansas Hope-Texarkana, Lafayette County High School, and the corporations “coming to town.”
She worries if Lewisville can be a place again.
“This is an opportunity to help people stay here, raise families here, to help save this part of small-town America,” Clark said. “We got to get this right.”
