BENTON COUNTY — Have you bought any lumber lately? I never get accustomed to today’s prices.
When plywood went up to $14 for a 4- by 8-foot sheet, I thought that was horribly high. Now I think a quality sheet of plywood can cost more than $30. I don’t buy a lot of lumber, but now and then I like to work with wood. I never see any bargains. When price is cheap, quality is cheap, and it is no bargain.
We never bought much lumber when I was growing up on the farm. But we always had lumber on hand;
or, if not, we could soon have it sawn. That was how we thought back then. If we needed lumber, we didn’t first think lumber yard; we first looked for suitable trees in our farm wood lots, and we got in touch with Ran Roller to saw the logs into lumber for us. The Roller family lived north of us at the state line. The Roller boys, Doyle and J.R., got on the school bus just after I did. I think theirs was the last farm in Arkansas on the Jacket Road. Ran Roller operated a small sawmill on his farm through the 1940s and 1950s. I think at one time he also sold gasoline from a small station along the road, as well as farming. His lumber operation was never large, but he sawed lumber for many of us around Pea Ridge and southwest Missouri. He usually worked with the hardwoods like white oak, producing rough, unfinished lumber for farm uses.
In earlier days, like from 1880 until about 1920, there was a really large lumber mill over near War Eagle, known as the Van Winkle Mill, supplying huge quantities of lumber. Probably most of the houses and business buildings in early Rogers, as well as much of Fayetteville, were constructed with lumber from the Van Winkle Mill. I have been told that the old Presbyterian Church in Pea Ridge was built with Van Winkle lumber. Some of the upper floor beams from that church are still in use today in the upper story of the Pea Ridge Museum (the old 1948 E.H. building). That may also be the case for early Pea Ridge buildings such as the Pea Ridge Academy, the old Methodist Church, and possibly old downtown structures such as the Pea Ridge Outlet Store and the little white Kelly Armstrong Cafe building next to it.
But on the farm, we tried to make use of lumber that came from trees on our place, with the help of sawmill operators like Ran Roller.
There were other smallsawmills around the area in those days, but I was not as personally aware of them as I was of the Roller’s. In about 1941, my dad felled numerous oak trees on our farm and hauled the logs to Lewis Patterson’s place, where Ray Patterson and a partner from Missouri operated a small sawmill for a short time. Our big hay barn, a hen house, a brooder house and an equipment shed were built with that rough oak lumber during World War II. I think Dad paid them for the sawmill work by shares of the lumber. There was no money in those days, but we didn’t realize we were poor. People found ways to get things done. For years after that, we still had a lumber pile of oak planks beside the old shop. When I was making my first efforts to learn to drive nails into boards, I learned that oak lumber gets hard as it cures, and it is really hard to drive a nail into it without bending the nail.
Many of our early farm buildings were built with oak lumber and roofed with cedar shingles, but our big barn was built with sheet iron roofing. Much of the original sheet iron and most of the original oak lumber still endures on the old barn after nearly 70 years. Later, in the mid-1950s, we had a patch of large sycamore trees just up the creek from the barn. Dad wanted to get rid of them to free up pastureland, so we called on Ran Roller to come cut those big sycamores into lumber. That was the first I had ever heard of sycamore lumber, and I was skeptical of it. I didn’t think it would last. But Mr. Roller sawed the boards for us, and we built an extension on the hen house, doubling its size, and added a big shed on the south end of the barn. We also used some of that rough sycamore lumber to make board fencing around the barn lot.
I was rarely around the sawmill when Ran Roller was sawing lumber, but I do remember that his sawmill was powered by a big six-cylinder truck engine, with no muffler, and that it really sounded off as the logs moved into the huge circular blade. Mr. Roller used a large, long, early ’40s Chevy truck in his logging. I’ve been told that the family kept that old truck for many years after Mr. Roller passed away, but that they no longer have it today.
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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 joe369@ centurytel.net, or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 09/15/2010