Dozens of young people from across the country have settled onto 157 acres of rolling land in Sharp County, several miles northeast of Ravenden. They were lured to the Ozarks by 35-year-old Eric Orwoll. The Southern California native is co-founder of Return to the Land, a private membership land association that bans Black, Latin American, Jewish and queer people.
Some might see Orwoll, a blond fellow with piercing blue eyes, as the personification of the Aryan race. With his Return to the Land movement, he’s on a mission to build whites-only communities in all 50 U.S. states, starting in the Ozarks. He encourages women members to bear as many babies as possible, in hopes of perpetuating and elevating white European identity.
When critical news coverage about the Return to the Land development started appearing in late July, Orwoll posted a video defending his vision.
“Over the last couple of weeks, Return to the Land, our private association for people of European heritage who desire to preserve that heritage through peaceful intentional communities, as well as our first physical community here in the Ozarks in Arkansas, have been under considerable attack in the mainstream media,” he said.
“There are now articles and videos on us with hundreds of thousands, millions of views, created by people who are obviously hostile to what we’re trying to do here. We believe that all Americans, regardless of their ethnic, racial or religious background, have the unalienable right to freely associate and peacefully assemble,” he said, claiming no government entity can breach this right.
Orwoll compares Return to the Land to other intentional communities formed by Black and indigenous groups as a way to preserve cultural identities.
“There was a Black intentional community in Georgia. The mainstream media had no problem with it. The Muslim community in Texas — that’s a little more controversial among conservatives, but they’re being allowed to proceed,” Orwoll said. “There are Native American reservations and there are many Jewish intentional communities in this country. So when other people do it, the mainstream people says nothing. When white people want to do it, in a mostly white area, suddenly it’s a huge issue.”
Kwami Abdul-Bey, a noted African American civil rights activist in Little Rock, is the founder of the Arkansas Peace and Justice Memorial Movement. He disagrees with Orwoll’s assertion that white people have the right to establish exclusive communities to preserve white culture.
“And if you choose to look deeper into the historical significance of Black communities like Elaine, Arkansas, Greenwood, Oklahoma, and Rosewood, Florida, you’ll see that they were created as a result of Blacks being excluded from the general white population through law and custom,” he said. “Yet at some point, these same white populations attacked and destroyed those excluded intentional communities.”
Arkansas has long been a landing spot for white supremacist groups, Abdul-Bey said.
“I read and researched this Return to the Land compound,” Abdul-Bey said. “It’s built upon a mixture of greed, criminality and opportunism, fueled by social deviants coming into Arkansas from all over the nation. Here in Arkansas, we have a history of these types of intentional communities.”
The Arkansas Ozarks were once a haven for white supremacist enclaves starting back in the 1970s, including the defunct Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, Kingdom Identity Ministries, and White Revolution. The Knights Party of the Ku Klux Klan, headquartered in remote Boone County, is still around. Efforts to contact the 80-year-old KKK leader, Thom Robb, for comment about his new young segregationist neighbors yielded no response.
Orwoll is not seeking paunchy white Boomer racists to join his movement. He’s targeting agile, disenfranchised Millennials and Gen Z youth to establish his “Return to the Land” empire.
Sharp County property records show that Return to the Land was registered under Wisdom Woods LLC in the state of Arkansas in September of 2023. Several weeks later, Orwoll and his partner, Peter Csere, along with three other LCC officers/managers, purchased the Sharp County property for $237,000. Limited liability companies protect owners’ personal assets from lawsuits and are not subject to federal income taxes. Profits and assets, which are not publicly disclosed, are shared among LLC owners.
Orwoll told a New York Times reporter that hundreds of followers have joined Return to the Land, proving eligibility by confirming white ancestry and submitting to virtual interviews and criminal background checks. Once approved, members may opt to purchase a unit or share of the LLC for $6,600, worth three acres of land.
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 seemingly outlaw property developments that discriminate based on race. Orwoll said he’s carefully structured his community in a way that makes the arrangement legal. After receiving complaints, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin late last month said he would investigate. The AG’s spokesman, Jeff LeMaster, said staff continue to review the matter.
On August 17, Orwoll posted on Facebook that a request for an investigation into Return to the Land has been referred to the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice.
“The DOJ may be instrumental in deciding whether any kind of white community will be legal in the U.S. going forward,” Orwoll posted online. “Please send a respectful letter in support.”
For now, he’s asking for donations to Return to the Land’s legal defense fund, which he refers to as “lawfare.”
“A win on our behalf would be a major win for the constitutional right to free association across the US, and a beacon of hope for the Western world,” he stated on Substack.
Before becoming a racist compound developer, Orwoll attended Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, studying French horn. He later earned income performing in amateur live-stream sex videos.
The timing of Orwoll’s newest venture could be financially auspicious, given the extreme anti-woke, anti-multicultural climate enveloping the nation under the Trump administration.
“I think that the regime Donald Trump is fully engaged in, is what might be called white identity politics,” said Guy Lancaster, long-time editor of the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas and a racial cleansing scholar.
“You’re seeing the erasure of Black names from military vessels, the firing of high-ranking Black officers, and complaints from the president himself about too much Black history on display in Black history museums. Media companies and business leaders have also fallen in line with the idea that the fruits of America really do just belong to white people,” Lancaster said.
In late July, Orwoll invited a reporter from the white nationalist website Occidental Dissent into his compound. The report went viral. Orwoll recently announced the launch of a national tour to promote expansion of his model community, traveling to meet with members of the Southern Cultural Center, a neo-Nazi group based in Wetumpka, Alabama.
“He told me he wants to build his private membership associations across the Deep South,” Tammy Curtis said.
Curtis is founder and publisher of the Spring River Chronicle in Hardy, 16 miles northwest of Ravenden. She first became aware of Orwoll this summer. Curtis agreed to interview him after he came by her office seeking local coverage.
“The young people stay on the property,” she said. “Forty people live on site, either in modest structures or tents. They’re primarily employed in the tech industry, so a lot of them, you know, have money and are able to work remotely.”
“Day to day life at Return to the Land involves raising livestock, gardening, canning both vegetables and meat, and learning new things to become self-sufficient and live off the land,” Curtis wrote in her article. “They also homeschool their children.”
Orwoll told Curtis that the public is invited to attend weekly community dinners and tour the grounds.
Some county residents, however, feel extremely uncomfortable about this development in their back yard, she said, and worry that members may be armed. Orwoll told Curtis no one engages in militia training, and that everyone is focused on recruiting new members.
“I hand-deliver papers to all the business and government offices in the region each week,” Curtis said, “and everyone is very worried about what this community is going to do to land values. It’s really putting a black eye on the county.”
Curtis said that locals question if this is some sort of scheme to defraud members who’ve purchased shares of the LLC yet have no real ownership stake in the property. Local recruitment is also a concern, she said.
“Orwoll explained that the planned community was designed to comply with all applicable laws,” Curtis wrote in her article. “At the same time, many feel it is morally wrong and taking three steps back to segregation in the state, giving the entire state and county the label as racists because the development is even allowed to exist.”
Vocal public reaction to Orwoll’s racist venture has been scant, limited to a few angry posts on social media. None of the dozen locals we queried would comment for this report, several citing fear of being targeted.
Fourth-generation Newton County native James Devito engaged in monitoring hate groups in the Arkansas Ozarks back in the ’80s and ’90s as a member of Klan Watch, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“The Ozarks have always been a place for people to hide out,” he said. “And also a place where people are close-lipped.”
Eric Orwoll, however, is openly campaigning for his cause. He recently claimed on Substack that Return to the Land is now drawing hardline conservatives from around the country to the Ozarks.
