Harvey Williams, Jr., co-founder of Delta Dirt Distillery, on the family farm. | Sono Motoyama
In Arkansas’s poor Delta region, the Williams family farm turns sweet potatoes — and the region’s troubled history of sharecropping — into award-winning Delta Dirt spirits
Rolling into Cherry Street, once the main drag of Helena, Arkansas, on a hot summer afternoon, you’ll find most of the storefronts empty. You might see a chef operating a streetside smoker at Delta Que & Brew, and one or two patrons digging into barbecue sandwiches, but there’s not much else.
Back in its boisterous heyday in the early 1900s, Helena served as a port for the cotton trade and a haven for Delta blues musicians — a “music, liquor, and gambling era,” as local historian Kyle Miller put it. The town still broadcasts one of the nation’s longest-running radio shows, King Biscuit Time, which has been spotlighting blues music since 1941. But the town of about 9,500 on the Mississippi River — which merged with neighboring West Helena in 2006 to form the awkwardly named Helena-West Helena — has seen steady population dropoff since 1960.
In the last few years, though, an anomalous cluster of cars and motorcycles has gathered at the corner of Cherry and Rightor streets, drawn by a stylish newcomer to the block: Delta Dirt Distillery.
The distillery, which opened in 2021, is the brainchild of Harvey Williams, who runs the business with his wife, Donna, and sons, Donavan and Thomas. It produces award-winning, farm-to-bottle, small-batch vodka and gin out of sweet potatoes, corn, and wheat from the Williams family farm. In the cool confines of the distillery’s cocktail lounge, patrons sample grapefruit mules (vodka, lime juice, grapefruit juice, and ginger beer) and gimlets (gin, lime juice, and simple syrup).
The elegant space is a bright spot in town. It’s also a full-circle moment for the Williams family.
Williams’s great grandfather, “Papa Joe” Williams, was a Black sharecropper who grew cotton on an 86-acre farm in Poplar Grove, 17 miles from Helena. Sharecropping was an inherently exploitative system. Unscrupulous landlords would often keep farming families in continual debt and sell them equipment, seed, fertilizer, and food at inflated prices. To escape the system, Papa Joe sought to buy the land, though he was unsuccessful. His son, UD “Daddy D” Williams, eventually realized that dream in 1949, and then passed down the farm to his 11 children. Williams’s father, Harvey Williams Sr., was the only one to farm the land, and today, three of his four children — Andre and Kennard, along with burgeoning distiller Harvey Jr. (who simply goes by Harvey) — farm 500-some acres.
In 2016, Kennard attended a farming conference where he learned that the North Carolina distiller Covington Spirits was making vodka from sweet potatoes (the spirit is usually made from fermented cereal grains or white potatoes). Sweet potatoes had been grown on the family’s land for decades, and Williams was immediately intrigued. With budding enthusiasm, he and his wife invested their retirement savings into creating a distillery using the family’s sweet potatoes.
Delta Dirt Distillery
A photo of UD Williams, who bought the farm out of sharecropping, inside the distillery.
Delta Dirt Distillery
Co-founders and spouses Donna and Harvey Williams, Jr. outside the distillery. Donna Williams also serves as chief brand officer; Harvey as CEO.
That’s when his father, Harvey Sr., revealed something surprising.
“My dad one day decides that he’s going to share some information with us,” Williams recalls. As the story goes, Williams’s grandad, Daddy D, made and sold moonshine on the side to raise money to escape sharecropping. Harvey Sr. even produced a jug that Daddy D used.
“He had never shared that story with us before,” Williams says. The revelation seemed like kismet — proof of a family legacy of distilling. Yet he also speculates that his father thought that others might judge the family for producing illegal moonshine. “I asked him, why didn’t we know? Why didn’t you tell us?” Williams recalls. “And he said, ‘It just never came up.’ I think that meant: We just don’t talk about it.”
A strong supporter of the distillery project, Harvey Sr. got to see Delta Dirt open in 2021. He died that same year.
Driving along the gravel road to the Williams farm feels like traveling to the family’s past. Standing on his grandfather’s porch and looking out at the landscape, the normally sunny Williams turns pensive.
In 1919, not far from the Williams farm, a group of Black farmers gathered in a church in Elaine, Arkansas, with a white lawyer from Little Rock. Their aim was to challenge landowners for a fairer distribution of profits. When a group of local white men approached the church, shots were fired, killing one white man (it remains unclear who shot first). Then-Governor Charles Brough ordered 500 soldiers from Camp Pike to put down the “insurrection.” Though the final death toll is in dispute, it’s estimated that between 100 and 240 Black people were killed by federal troops, local authorities, and deputized civilians in what became known as the Elaine Massacre.
As the director of Helena’s Delta Cultural Center, Miller notes that 30 years later, when Daddy D bought his farm, Black farmers still experienced challenges getting fair prices for their crops and farming expenses. Miller says Black farmers historically paid “jacked-up” prices for supplies and earned below-market pay for their crops, mainly cotton and soybeans, a tradition of dispossession that went on for generations.
Delta Dirt Distillery
UD Williams with Daron Watson and Harvey Jr.
During the last hundred years or so, the number of Black farmers in Arkansas plummeted 98 percent, from 72,275 in 1920 to 1,376 in 2022, according to the Department of Agriculture. On the road leading to the family farm, Williams remembers there being multiple Black family farms, which are all gone now. The plight of Black farmers in Arkansas mirrors the broader, national picture. In 1920, there were one million Black farmers across the U.S.; between 1910 and 1997, they lost 90 percent of their land.
Many factors were at play, including the Great Migration, when Black people relocated from the American South to Northern, Western, and Midwestern industrial centers. A destabilizing inheritance practice known as heirs’ property, together with systematic racism in federal agricultural aid programs, also played a role. Harvey Sr. faced this injustice firsthand and joined a class-action lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman, which shined a light on the USDA’s discriminatory loans and assistance programs. Though the case was settled in the plaintiffs’ favor and Harvey Sr. filed numerous formal complaints against the USDA, “it never amounted to anything,” Williams recalls. The family never received any compensation as a result of the settlement.
Yet, they always found innovative ways to survive. Daddy D not only sold moonshine on the side; he also went around his landlord to find a new buyer for his cotton at a gin where he could get a fair price. Harvey Sr. diversified from growing traditional row crops like soybeans, cotton, and corn to cultivating vegetables, including sweet potatoes, which needed less land and brought in higher margins. He also, Williams jokes, raised his own workforce of four sons, which helped make the farm sustainable.
And now, there’s Delta Dirt.
Though the Williams family’s farm comprises hundreds of acres, Delta Dirt spirits are from crops grown on Daddy D’s original 86. It’s just one way the brand honors its roots. Also, to commemorate that original land, the vodka comes in at 86 proof — slightly higher than the standard 80.
Since the company capped its first bottle in 2020, Delta Dirt vodka has been buoyed by multiple awards, including the prestigious platinum award at the 2024 San Francisco World Spirits Competition for the brand’s sweet, distinctly earthy distillate. It was also featured in Distilled, a docuseries that streamed on AMC+ in August. The vodka’s balance, along with its floral and fruity aromas, drew praise at the 2022 American Craft Spirits Association competition. Rhapsodizing about the aromatics, one judge — who gave it a score of 99 out of 100 — wrote in their notes, “Wow. How did you do this?”
Delta Dirt Distillery
On the Williams family farm in Poplar Grove, 17 miles from Helena.
As a young man, he left the farm to study agricultural engineering at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He then pursued a decades-long career in food production, living in Memphis, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Dallas, working for agro-food giants like Sara Lee and Cargill. It took him 30 years to make his way back to the family homestead.
“I had a great career and great life,” Williams says. “But I always had this longing to want to come back home.” When an opportunity arose to run a plant in Arkansas for a tortilla chip manufacturer, he jumped at the chance. He eventually left that job to go all-in on the distillery.
That time away from the farm proved valuable. Williams learned USDA and Food and Drug Administration rules, which are important in the heavily regulated spirits industry, and became at ease in a manufacturing environment. Though Delta Dirt operates on a much smaller scale than his former employers, Williams says “many of the same fundamentals applied,” like maintaining equipment, sourcing materials, and making production schedules.
His greatest lesson came not from large food companies, but at his father’s knee. Farmers are traditionally crushed between the price of inputs from agricultural corporations (seed, fertilizer, weed killer) and the price commodity markets will pay for the outputs (vegetables, grain, cotton). Crucially, Delta Dirt takes the raw products from the farm and adds value on top, processing crops like sweet potatoes and corn into spirits.
“I remember, even as a kid, my dad telling us, ‘You want to do something value-added because otherwise it’s just another commodity, and you’re going to get the lowest price possible for that commodity,’” Williams says. “Instead of getting $20 for that bushel of potatoes, you’re getting $30 for a bottle of vodka.” The distillery also controls the entire supply chain, from farming the raw ingredients to manufacturing the spirits to selling bottles on site.
Beyond a business and manufacturing plan, the distillery needed a home. Williams originally considered installing the distillery on the farm in Poplar Grove, but then he thought about Helena. The town had declined since Williams was a child, when he recalls it being “full of life and music and activities.” It still, however, had the King Biscuit Blues Festival, founded in 1986, bringing national talent and hordes of blues enthusiasts to the town every October.
“I thought we could take advantage of the thousands of people that come every year to get exposure for our business,” Williams says. So the family settled on a corner property downtown for their distillery.
Delta Dirt Distillery
Scenes from inside the distillery.
What he didn’t think about, he now admits, was the declining local population and sparse financial infrastructure in the area, a consequence, in part, of decades of racial and economic discrimination in this majority-Black town. “Helena’s high poverty rate leaves [people with] little disposable income,” Williams says. “And if you want to grow a business, you don’t have a really good support structure to help you do that.”
But Williams had never planned on staying within the town’s limits. Thanks to national and local sales, the business has more than doubled production in three years, distributing the spirits online and in stores in Arkansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, with plans to expand to Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, and Missouri.
This spring, Delta Dirt introduced an entirely new spirit category, inspired by bourbon but containing their signature ingredient, sweet potatoes. Since, by definition, bourbon can only contain grains, they named their golden liquid Arkansas Brown. The first batch sold out in less than a day; limited quantities of the second batch, released in mid-August, are only available at the distillery.
“It is a phenomenal product,” Williams says. “It has this really pleasant, sweet oak aroma that smells like a maple bourbon,” with caramel notes and a smooth mouthfeel. He hopes to ramp up production in the coming years.
While Williams and his family are focused on growing their brand, he hasn’t lost sight of his Delta roots or the significance of creating wealth from land that has seen so much sorrow. “I’m hopeful that what we’re doing can show people that you can have a business, you can transform your community in the midst of even this decline,” he says. Like his father, grandfather, and great grandfather, he’s concentrating not on the past, but on the future. “You have to change and transform. Otherwise you’re going to die and be left behind.”
Sono Motoyama is a journalist who writes about food, health, and technology.
Fact checked by Kesley Lannin
Copy edited by Laura Michelle Davis
