During World War II, the Phillips County fairground opposite Imogene Eakin’s Cleburne Avenue home in West Helena was converted into a prisoner-of-war camp with guard towers, barbed-wire fence, and an exhibit hall turned into offices, barracks, and a mess hall. The War Department authorized the camp on August 7, 1943, after the Phillips County Farmers Association sought 885 war prisoners to replace men who had entered the armed forces or taken war-related factory jobs. The first prisoners arrived on September 9, 1943, when about 200 Italians were transferred from the prisoner-of-war camp at Monticello, Arkansas, and in January 1944 German prisoners replaced them. At its height, the camp held almost 500 prisoners. Taken by truck each morning in crews of about thirty, prisoners worked despite having little farm experience, tending livestock, managing rice levees, bringing in hay, planting, fertilizing, and harvesting truck crops, and picking thousands of pounds of cotton, leading Phillips County farmers to call them “life savers.” In 1944, a second Phillips County camp was established in Elaine, and the War Department eventually authorized thirty work camps in Arkansas, all but four in the Delta. The West Helena camp closed on March 21, 1946, and the property returned to the Phillips County Fair Association.