PEA RIDGE — Constructing houses and farm buildings has always been an interest of mine. I first came to awareness at a time when my dad was building new buildings on the farm. In the early 1940s, he began with the large barn, and then a hen house for laying hens and a brooder house for baby chicks.
I remember only a few houses being built in Pea Ridge in the 1940s. The early half of the 1940s were World War II days, and not many people built houses then. After the end of the war in 1945 there was a revival of house building.
Still, the only house that I recall going up in Pea Ridge then was the Hugh and Nell Webb house, at the east end of today’s McIntosh Street.
That was about 1946. That house was a style transition house, unlike houses built in the 1930s, 1920s and earlier. One of the most obvious differences was its blond brick. We had not seen many brick homes in Pea Ridge before that - I really don’t recall any at all. We were accustomed to public buildings such as the school being built with traditional dark red bricks.
Blond bricks were a new touch. After that, people planning new houses would be considering, “What color of brick shall we use?”
The real surge of housebuilding in Pea Ridge, as I remember it, came in the 1950s. We were building a new house on our farm at that time, and several houses were going up in town.
Those I remember best were on today’s McCulloch Street, going west, and in the area south of town formed by the new streets now known as Price Street, Lyon Street and Hays Street. In 1950, the highway to Rogers had been paved, and some sections of it were relocated. Instead of taking Patton Street, Carr Street and Ryan Road to go to Rogers, we had gained the new street we call Curtis Avenue today, extending south from the Pea Ridge canning plant (across from today’s Collier Drug) out to Little Sugar Creek (the route we travel today).
Although the economy was improving in the early 1950s, people were still conservative and cautious, and most houses built then were modest, costing about $5,000. Some of those had partial brick veneer along the front of the house, but many still used wood siding painted white. People in those days began choosing western-style houses, influenced by the long, low houses that were common in the southwest. Many of them had an attached single-car garage. Few people then had more than one vehicle. If the old-time houses had a garage, it was normally a separate small building several steps away from the house. Horses, cars and pickup trucks were not allowed in the house in the old days. That has changed over the years, beginning with the 1950s, so that today our garages and cars have taken over the house.
For our new farmhouse we didn’t choose the western-style house, but we did include a few of the newer features. My folks wanted a basement, and we also planned for two large upstairs rooms, using what we called a story and a half style. The upstairs rooms were up against the rafters, and the slope of the rafters gave the ceiling a slope on each side. In the 1950s, it was stylish to have a “picture window” in your living room. Whereas older houses normally used multi-pane windows, having six or eight panes of glass in each window, picture windows were made of a large single sheet of plate glass. So our 1953 house had a picture window, and we thought we were right up there in style. Also, inthose years, many people were getting their own new electronic wonder, a television, and were faced with a new question: Where shall we put the TV? TV antennas appeared above the houses. There was no cable TV then, and most antennas brought in only three channels, Pittsburgh, Kan.;
Fort Smith, Ark.; and Joplin or Springfield, Mo. The TV usually went into the living room. Few people were rich enough to have more than one TV.
Another difference between older houses and those built in the 1950s was the ceiling height, which was becoming a standard eight feet. In early 20th century houses, ceilings were often high - 10 feet or even 12 feet. That made them cooler in hot weather.The new 1950s houses had to rely on electric fans. Air conditioning was to come later, but the stage was set for the dependence on electricity which is common for us today. Many of our houses today are hardly livable if the electric power fails.
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Editor’s note: 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 [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 11/17/2010