[4] The community has seen a rapid decline in economic activity and population since the advent of mechanization on the farm, reducing the need for manual labor to produce cotton.

[6] All residents of Wilson except the postmaster and railroad employees had access to company doctors for $1.25 annually ($22.8 in 2024 dollars), a rarity in the poverty-stricken Arkansas delta.

[7] The company also employed people to work in Wilson's basic service industries, such as drycleaning and automobile repair, keeping the standard of living high.

Wilson began construction on a railroad to connect the town with Golden Landing and his saw mill operations in the area.

[7] The town incorporated in 1959, selling the houses to the renters living in them and gaining access to tax income it was previously excluded from as a company entity.

On January 27, 1921, the lynching of Henry Lowry happened near Wilson; some 500 people participated in the burning of a black sharecropper.

Along and parallel to the Tennessee–Arkansas state line, the former course of the Mississippi River as it was before the 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes is still visible in the landscape more than 200 years after the events.

The former riverbed has shrunk to small side arms of the Mississippi which, dependent on the water level and precipitation, are still partly connected to the river.

Modern machines like the cotton picker have made manual cultivation obsolete over time as they took over the work from the hand laborers.

[4] The Hampson Museum State Park in downtown Wilson exhibits an archeological collection of early American aboriginal artifacts from the Nodena site 5 mi (8 km) east of the town.

The museum documents the culture of a civilization which existed in a 15-acre (60,703 m2) palisaded village on a meander bend of the Mississippi River in the area around 1400–1650 CE.

Cultivation of crops, hunting, social life, religion and politics of that ancient civilization are topics of the exhibition.