At a community forum in 2024, Helena-West Helena residents were asked to tell the difference between images of their downtown and war-torn Kyiv, Ukraine.
As the city’s mayor, Joseph Whitfield, put it, “We asked them to identify the differences between these pictures, and you couldn’t really tell.”
Like other towns in the Arkansas Delta, Helena-West Helena has experienced population loss and divestment over the last 50-plus years. Whitfield, who was appointed to the post by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders about nine months ago, said he’s well acquainted with his city’s issues. But there are also several things that inspire hope – like his Friday night cocktail spot, Delta Dirt Distillery.
There’s a laundry list of things that make Delta Dirt Distillery unique, said Harvey Williams, the small business’ owner and founder. Chief among them is their fermentation process, as they use sweet potatoes when making their liquor.
“People, when they see sweet potato vodka, like, ‘Ok, is it going to taste like sweet potato? Is that gonna taste like what I eat during Thanksgiving?’ And it doesn’t, but it is derived from a sweet potato, so the raw ingredient used is a sweet potato. But you do get a unique flavor profile that you don’t get from any other vodka,” said Williams.
Part of why it’s possible for Williams and his family to ferment sweet potatoes is because they have a consistent supply of them from their nearby family farm.
Despite four generations of his family working the farm, they didn’t own the property until his grandfather purchased it in 1949 with money from picking cotton and selling moonshine. Since then, the Williams family has farmed there.
Though Williams is from closer to Marianna, another city in the Arkansas Delta, he has memories of Helena-West Helena from when he was young.
“I grew up, like I said, 20 miles from here, near our farm there. But when we came to town, we came here, and this was a hustling, bustling place,” he said. “I mean, I got my school clothes here before there was online shopping or we couldn’t go to the big mall in Memphis or somewhere.”
The process of extracting the fermentable sugars from sweet potatoes can be prohibitively difficult. Williams knows of just three other distilleries that use sweet potatoes in their alcohol production, none of which are in Arkansas.
Using sweet potatoes, however, gives the alcohol unique attributes. Of course, it still tastes like alcohol, but it’s less harsh and more aromatic, according to Williams.
“You get an aroma there that you typically wouldn’t get from a vodka. This is not a rubbing alcohol smell. This is a, I hate to say it, but the term that people use most when they smell that, when they give a nose of our vodka, they say ‘this gives me this whole sense of a tequila,’” said Williams.
Other than vodka and gin, Delta Dirt Distillery also offers two dark liquor options, their Sweet Roots Arkansas Brown and Deep Roots Arkansas Brown.
The Arkansas Brown liquor is similar to a bourbon, but its components (corn, sweet potatoes, rye and barley) preclude it from being an official bourbon.
The Williams Family distillery is also unique in that it is one of only a small percentage of Black-owned distilleries in the country. According to Distillery Trail, a group that provides insights on the liquor business in the U.S., only about 45 of the more than 2000 American distilleries are Black-owned.
“We’re creating this liquid legacy company, and that’s our storyline told in two words, liquid legacy,” Williams said.
Helena-West Helena has a median household income of $36,000 according to U.S. Census data. That is less than half the amount made by median households in the U.S., as a whole. The city’s population has also declined by nearly 14% between 2020 and 2025.
“And don’t get me wrong, I’m also one of those people who grew up down here and left. I mean, my wife and I left after high school. We went to college, and we were gone for better than 25 years, and we moved back,” Williams said. “I think there are people who want to move back to places that they come from even if they haven’t been there or lived there.”
Whitfield understands that his community has endemic problems, but he said Delta Dirt Distillery offers a glimpse into the solution for the city – increased investment and community support.
“Them opening and celebrating their fifth year anniversary at a time where Helena-West Helena is kind of going through a rebranding – we need to redefine who we are, we need to reset where we want to be in the next five to ten years – it’s a spark of hope,” Whitfield said.
And Williams agrees.
“I believe that this town, this area has a place. It already has a place in history. I think it has a place in the future,” said the distillery’s owner.
Whatever comes next for Helena-West Helena, Williams said Delta Dirt Distillery is in it for the long haul.
“We could have located anywhere, and we don’t have any plans of relocating anywhere. And we're located here because this town has really a rich history,” he said.
This story was made possible through a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
