 Dyess Colony was established in Mississippi County, Arkansas in 1934 as part of the New Deal efforts of Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide economic relief to destitute workers in the Great Depression.The experiment was the largest such community-building experiment established by the federal government during these years.The project was established by Mississippi Country cotton planter and local politician William Reynolds Dyess (1894-1936), director of the Arkansas Emergency Relief Administration, who initially sought the establishment of a self-supporting agricultural community housing 800 families upon unused Mississippi Delta farmland.