Wilmot is a little town in Ashley County, in southeast Arkansas. Its main street—U.S. Highway 165—runs north-south on the east side of a railroad track, raised on a bed several feet above the highway itself. Once a town reliant on agriculture and cotton production, the growth of mechanized farming in the 1950s and 1960s and the arrival of mass retail in the 1970s made people leave Wilmot just as in other rural areas of the U.S.