William Maurice Smith Sr. was born in 1880 on the Smith plantation. He organized W.M. Smith & Co., later W.M. Smith & Sons, cleared the Burr Place timber on the St. Francis, and built the 1903–05 house on Major R. Pope’s Walnut Camp site — 10 CR 334, parcel 002-00836-000.
He bought his first commercial Angus in 1925. Purebred herd in the 1930s. Slogan: Quality Angus breeding since 1936. In 1951 the farm held the first private Angus auction in Arkansas. He died 6 August 1959, weeks before the Aberdeen-Angus Journal called Birdeye “a Veteran of the Mid-South” — 400+ registered cows.
Four children with Clarah Anne Hamilton: Maurice Jr., Anne, J.H., and Elizabeth Levesque. After the war those four couples shared the big house, then built across Pope Creek, west of Highway 163, still on the old tract. He sat as president of Drainage District No. 6. The plantation only works if the bottoms stay dry.
