A New Dawn in the Delta

Interior designer Heather Chadduck hillegas awakens an ancestral arkansas farmhouse with a flourish of pattern, verdant color, and youthful gusto.

- By Stephanie Hunt. Photography by Stephanie Hunt

“I grew up in the Delta, on the Mississippi side, but never in a gazillion years did I imagine I’d end up back here,” says Elizabeth Poindexter Shackelford, who for the last 10-plus years lived in Birmingham, Alabama, where she bought and renovated a historic bungalow. “I was super proud of that. I’d made a whole life there. I loved walking down the street to a restaurant or to meet friends for drinks. I had no intention of leaving,” she says. But romance, and an old cotton gin, can lure back even a converted city girl.

Today Elizabeth and her husband, Sam, live just across the Mississippi River from where she grew up, in a century-old home in the rural metropolis of Montrose, Arkansas—population 200. The old railroad town once had a hotel and even a store or two; now there’s only a post office and lots of Delta-rich farmland where Sam grows cotton, corn, and soybeans, as did his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father. “When Sam and I started dating, I knew he was tied to this land, that farming was in his blood, and what it would mean for me,” says Elizabeth. But she didn’t expect the joys of living in a place—and a home—steeped in four generations of family history, including that still-operable cotton gin run by Sam’s father.