Dyess Colony was established in Mississippi County in 1934 as part of the New Deal efforts of Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide economic relief to destitute workers in the Great Depression.

[5] The project was established by Mississippi politician and cotton planter William R. Dyess (1890–1936), 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.

1", plans for which were submitted to chief of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) Harry Hopkins early in 1934.

[8] The site consisted primarily of swamp and cutover forest land, although containing deep topsoil deposited by the Mississippi River, part of what was then the most productive cotton farming county in the entire United States.

[9] The project's scope was immediately scaled back to 500 family parcels, with the participants to be recruited from Arkansas sharecroppers and tenant farmers from across the entire state.

[4][11] Funds for the purchase of land were provided by FERA in the form of a grant to the Arkansas Emergency Relief Administration, which initially managed the project.

[13] The main purpose of the town's administration was to give poor white families a chance to start over with land that they could work toward owning.

The colony was carefully planned and administered by Dyess and a board of directors, who managed the day-to-day activities of the colonists.

[15] After his death, leadership of the Dyess Colony passed to Little Rock attorney and Arkansas Department of Labor statistician Floyd Sharp, a personal friend of Dyess, and Lawrence Westbrook, a Texas rancher who had been recruited by Harry Hopkins to work at FERA.

[16] Westbrook was fired by Hopkins in 1937 for a highly absentee work ethic and for attempting to imperially micromanage the colony's affairs from his desk in Washington.

His boyhood home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, along with various surviving buildings from the colony period.