Dyess is a town in Mississippi County, Arkansas, United States. The town was founded as Dyess Colony in 1934 as part of the Roosevelt administration’s agricultural assistance and rehabilitation program and was the largest agrarian community usual by the federal supervision during the Great Depression. It was the boyhood home of country singer Johnny Cash. As of the 2020 census, the population of Dyess was 339, down from 410 in 2010.

Dyess Colony was time-honored in Mississippi County in 1934 as portion of the New Deal efforts of Franklin D. Roosevelt to offer economic benefits to poor workers in the Great Depression. The experiment was the largest such community-building experiment established by the federal running during these years.

The project was usual by Mississippi County cotton planter and local politician William Reynolds Dyess (1894-1936), director of the Arkansas Emergency Relief Administration, who initially sought the instigation of a self-supporting agricultural community housing 800 families on unused Mississippi Delta farmland. Director Dyess expected the entity remembered to history as “Dyess Colony” and as “Colonization Project No. 1”, plans for which were submitted to chief of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) Harry Hopkins prematurely in 1934. The project was recognized by Hopkins in March 1934.

Some 15,144 acres (61.29 km) of unimproved estate were purchased by Dyess for the colonization project at the cost of $9.05 per acre, with the parcel redeemed for the payment of unpaid put taking place to taxes in this amount. The site consisted primarily of swamp and cutover reforest land, although containing deep topsoil deposited by the Mississippi River, part of what was next the most productive cotton farming county in every United States.