Clark County Paid $24,000 an Acre Near Gurdon's Rail Site. Timberland a Mile Away Sells for a Tenth of That.
On February 9, 2026, the Economic Development Corp. of Clark County held a virtual meeting to talk about buying nine acres of dirt outside Gurdon. Not glamorous by county-commission standards, but the numbers are worth sitting with if you own, or are thinking about buying, ground anywhere along that stretch of Highway 67.
The board put dollar figures on two adjoining properties. The first, six acres at 1595 N. Elm St. owned by Sherman and Rhonda Whittle, includes a 2,400-square-foot shop built in 2021 and sits wedged between the county's existing industrial site and the federal highway, giving it frontage and access to U.S. 67. The second, three acres of timber owned by Lisabeth Loveless, sits just south of that same industrial tract. Combined asking price for both properties: $220,000, plus an estimated $9,000 in fees and environmental assessment costs, according to reporting from The Arkadelphian. The board approved the offer and sent it back to the sellers, who have the option to accept.
Do the arithmetic and that's roughly $24,000 an acre before fees, near $25,400 an acre after. Meanwhile, county land-sale records put the median price across Clark County at $3,307 an acre, and typical South Arkansas timberland trades closer to $2,400 an acre. The county just offered something like seven to ten times the going rate for raw ground fifteen minutes down the road.
That gap isn't a mistake. It's the clearest local evidence available right now for something landowners in this corridor need to understand before they price anything: adjacency to a committed industrial site changes what land is worth, and it changes it before a single building goes up.
This February deal isn't the county's first run at this ground. In August 2024, the EDCCC entered an option agreement with Weyerhaeuser to buy about 60 acres of mostly undeveloped land south of the Georgia-Pacific wood products plant, adjacent to an existing rail spur that connects to the Union Pacific line through the short-line Arkansas Midland Railroad. The board finalized that purchase in November 2024 for roughly $360,000, or about $6,000 an acre, for what was described at the time as a young pine plantation likely to be cleared for construction.
The plan both times has been the same: assemble land for a rail transload facility, the kind of setup where trucks and railcars swap freight, aimed at helping local manufacturers and recruiting new ones. Arkansas Midland Railroad told county officials it already had interest from regional manufacturers, though it wouldn't name them, and confirmed none handle hazardous materials. Later cost estimates put the facility itself at around $1 million to build, an expense the EDCCC can absorb because it's funded by the county's voter-approved half-cent sales tax for economic development, which generates roughly $2 million a year. The Arkadelphia Regional Alliance's own listing for the assembled site touts direct Highway 67 frontage and a location about seven miles from Interstate 30, tying the rail spur to the region's broader freight network.
So in fifteen months, the price the county was willing to pay for ground touching this site quadrupled on a per-acre basis, from $6,000 to somewhere near $24,000. The 2024 tract already carried a rail-adjacency premium over raw timberland. The 2026 tract, closer still and fronting the highway, carries another premium on top of that, even though part of its price reflects an existing shop building rather than dirt alone.
| Land type or transaction | Approximate price per acre | What's included |
|---|---|---|
| South Arkansas timberland, typical | ~$2,400 | Standing pine or hardwood, no road frontage advantage |
| Clark County, all recorded sales (median) | $3,307 | Blended across 201 tracked county land sales |
| EDCCC's 2024 purchase, 60 acres from Weyerhaeuser | ~$6,000 | Young pine plantation adjoining an existing rail spur |
| EDCCC's 2026 offer, 9 acres from two owners | ~$24,000 to $25,400 | Combines a 2,400-SF shop with three acres of adjoining timber, both bordering the assembled industrial site and Highway 67 |
Two things worth separating here. The 2026 figure isn't a clean land-only number since it bundles a building into the price, so treat it as a ceiling estimate for what adjacency plus improvements can command, not a pure per-acre land value. Even accounting for that, the six acres of raw timber the county paid roughly $6,000 an acre for in 2024 already sat well above the county median, purely because of what touched it: an existing rail spur tied into a working short-line railroad.
None of this means Clark County land in general has gotten more valuable. It means a specific, narrow category of land, the kind that sits inside or immediately against an assembled industrial site with rail and highway access, is being priced by a different logic than the acre next to it that lacks those features.
The EDCCC isn't a typical buyer chasing the best deal on the open market. It needs contiguous parcels to make a transload site work, and it has a dedicated, recurring funding stream to pursue that goal patiently, one adjoining tract at a time, over years if necessary. That kind of buyer will pay a premium a private timber investor never would, because the value it's purchasing isn't board feet of pine. It's site control, highway frontage, and the option to plug into an existing rail connection that already runs to a working plant.
For a landowner along that stretch, the premium is real, but it's also narrow. It applies to parcels that actually touch the site or front the highway near it. A tract a half mile off, with the same soil and the same timber stand but no frontage and no adjacency, is still going to price against the county median or the regional timberland average, not against what the county paid for the Whittle and Loveless properties.
The limits here deserve the same weight as the numbers above. The transload facility doesn't exist yet. The EDCCC itself has said that even if the facility never gets built, the acreage would still be valuable to the county for other economic development purposes, but that's a statement about the county's downside protection, not a guarantee of activity for anyone else's land nearby. Arkansas Midland Railroad's mention of interested manufacturers came without names, so the corridor's future tenant demand is still an open question rather than a settled fact.
That distinction matters if you're trying to value land in the area today. Frontage on Highway 67 near the site and direct adjacency to county-owned parcels are provable, physical facts you can point to. A future transload facility with confirmed tenants isn't yet one of them. Price the certain part accordingly, and treat the rest as upside that hasn't been locked in.
If your property touches the Gurdon Industrial Site boundary, fronts Highway 67 within sight of it, or sits close enough that a rail-served tenant could plausibly want it, a straight timber cruise or a standard per-acre farmland comparison isn't going to capture what you actually have. That kind of land benefits from being evaluated by someone who can weigh both sides, the standing timber and soil value on one hand, and the industrial and frontage potential on the other, rather than defaulting to whichever number is easier to pull.
For acreage farther out, along other stretches of the county with no rail or highway adjacency, the county median and regional timberland figures are still the right starting point. Not every acre near Gurdon is suddenly an industrial site. Most of it is exactly what it was last year: timber, pasture, and quiet.
Does this mean any land near Gurdon is now worth $24,000 an acre? No. That figure reflects one transaction that bundles a building with land directly touching an already-assembled industrial site with highway frontage. A parcel without that adjacency, even a short distance away, still prices against the county median of roughly $3,300 an acre.
What happens to nearby land value if the transload facility never gets built? The county has said the acreage would remain valuable to it for other development purposes even without a facility. For everyone else's land nearby, that means the current premium reflects optionality and site control, not confirmed activity, so near-term appreciation expectations deserve some caution until tenants and construction plans firm up.
How can I find out what neighboring parcels have actually sold for? Clark County Circuit Clerk's office keeps public records of real estate transactions, and local reporting periodically rounds up county deals of $100,000 or more by name and price, giving a landowner a way to track real comparable sales in the corridor rather than relying on statewide averages alone.
If you're trying to figure out what your acreage near Gurdon is actually worth, whether it's raw timber, pasture, or something that happens to sit next to a highway with a rail spur behind it, that's exactly the kind of valuation question Bluebird Real Estate spends its time on. Reach out and we'll walk the ground with you before anyone puts a number on it.
When we assist you with buying or selling, we evaluate the property and your goal as if they were our own. It’s really that simple – doing business the way it used to be done.
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