Thomas Williams / Delta Dirt Distillery

Delta Dirt Distillery is a family-owned craft distillery in Helena, Arkansas, rooted in Phillips County farmland the Williams family has worked for four generations. The story begins with patriarch "Papa" Joe Williams, who sharecropped the original 86 acres in the late 1800s, and with his son U.D., who purchased that land out of sharecropping in 1949 using earnings from cotton and homemade corn liquor. Harvey Sr. later reinvented the farm for vegetable production, centering it on sweet potatoes and squash shipped into national distribution. Today, Harvey and Donna Williams and their children, including Thomas, have taken that same Delta earth and turned it into something unexpected: platinum-medal spirits distilled from their own farm-grown produce, recognized at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition as among the best in the country. Thomas Williams brings that full arc of history, labor, land, loss, and reinvention, to the Arkansas Folklife Festival Foodways stage.