PEA RIDGE — I have come to think of the Pea Ridge community as the entire area making up today’s Pea Ridge School District. But I remember that in years gone by our Pea Ridge community was made up of numerous smaller communities. Pea Ridge is still a small community today, and in the 1940s and 1950s it was even smaller. But back then, we were surrounded by small rural communities.
I think of the most prominent earlier rural communities as Shady Grove, northwest of town; Twelve Corners, situated northeast of town; and maybe Central, near old Leetown.
Twelve Corners was at one time something of a town, with stores, a church and school.
This was true of Bayless as well. Bayless was southwest of Gateway on Gann Ridge Road.
So far as I know, Shady Grove only had a schoolhouse and no store, but the schoolhouse was enough to make it an active and thriving community center. In my family, we always thought of ourselves as Shady Grove people. Shady Grove included mainly the farm families living west of Otter Creek, the Pea Ridge watershed creek running north from town and emptying into Big Sugar Creek at the Missouri line. We even regarded Jacket, Mo., as a Pea Ridge community since many Jacket people often traded in Pea Ridge.
I think Shady Grove ceased having school in about 1929.
Someone please correct me on that if I am wrong! After the school closed, the people wanted to keep the building and use it as a community center. We had quite a variety of things going on at Shady Grove. We used to have Thursday night singings. There weren’t performing groups in those days;
we just got together as a group of families, someone played the piano, someone led singing and we sang songs together through an evening. We alwayshad young people there as well as old folks.
Sometimes Mr. Buck Hall would call up a quartet on the spot, and we would get up and sing. It was a time when we who were learning to sing and to read music could sing with others, learn gospel songs and just enjoy an evening together.
I remember that at one time a Mr. Jackson from Dug Hill (now in Bella Vista) came over to Shady Grove and held a singing school. It went on for several evenings. We went through “the rudiments” of music and learned our “do, re, me, fa, so, la, ti, does.” All that was before TV. TV kind of hindered the Thursday night singings.
I remember Shady Grove families like the Rickettss, Walkers, Halls, Bones, Jeffersons, Hensons, Givens, McKinneys, Hickmans, Mc-Cools, Snyders, Fletchers, Coffees, Jacksons and others.
We also had revival meetings. I especially remember a revival held by Bro. Amos Howard and a preacher friend of his. One would preach one night and the other the next. One night Bro. Howard got so worked up that he had to sit down, and his friend had to finish the sermon for him. Those gospel meetings used to be called “protracted meetings” because after a week the people would decide if we should go another week? It was a “protracted” meeting when it went longer.
I also especially remember Vacation Bible Schools at Shady Grove, held by two ladies from Mountain, Mo., with help from others. We would have a houseful of kids from all around the area, and we learned lots of Bible stories.
Shady Grove also had a great, long-enduring Extension Homemakers Club. And over the more recent years, many music shows have made the old Shady Grove schoolhouse their “theater,” including the Shady Grove Bluegrass band.
Shady Grove has seen lots of good fiddlin’, geetar strummin’, mandolin and banjo pickin’ and big bass plunkin’!
Of course there were other schools in the rural areas around Pea Ridge, each being something of a community center in its day. Buttram’s Chapel, which now is only a cemetery, was once a bustling center, with Masonic Lodge, Methodist Church and school sharing the original twostory building. The Pea Ridge Academy opened at Buttram’s Chapel in 1874, and moved into Pea Ridge in 1880. About two miles east of Buttram’s Chapel was Cross Lanes School. My wife’s mother, Zula Troy, went to school there, as did Joe Pitts,Johnny Clanton, his sister Effie and other Pea Ridgers. Still further east in the Leetown area was Central School, another bustling place. My mother told stories of going with her Valley View classmates over to Central School for “ciphering matches.” Ciphering matches were a bit like spelling bees, only the competitors raced each other in addin’, subtractin’ , multiplyin’ and dividin’!
◊◊◊
Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history.
He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at joe369@ centurytel.net, or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 04/14/2010