Last week I asked if some of the folks who read this column knew about where there were apple dryers around Pea Ridge in years gone by. This week I’ve been talking to Alva Johnson about that, and he has helped me. I had always known Alva as our Pea Ridge lumber man, back when the Pea Ridge Lumber Co. was located at the north end of Curtis Avenue. Alva delivered much of the lumber we used to build our house in 1953. I notice that even today, the lumber sheds that Alva used years ago are still in place behind the Pea Ridge Historical Society Museum.
Alva remembered two apple dryers close to Pea Ridge, one on Lee Town Road, which in the early days would have been about a mile south of town, and one about a mile east of town on Arkansas Highway 72. I have had others tell me that there was at one time an apple dryer between Pea Ridge and Bentonville, possibly located on the Pea Ridge side of Jac’s Ranch.
I also had some impression that there may have been an apple dryer in Pea Ridge, possibly on the Dari-Park side of Davis Street at East Pickens.
Apparently not many pictures were taken of the old apple dryers, orchards or apple processing sheds around Pea Ridge. I would love to find pictures depicting any part of the apple industry in our community.
Within my lifetime, we have seen Pea Ridge go from a largely farming area to more of a suburban residential area, with people finding jobs in retailing, trucking, service industries or practicing professions in the larger cities of Benton County. In my growing up days, I tended to suppose that Pea Ridge had always been the kind of area that I knew in the 1940s and 1950s. But as I learned more about our area, it was surprising to find that our area and the county have always been changing, as people have tried different crops and occupations in the quest to make a good living. In farming, some early Pea Ridge settlers tried raising tobacco, some tried cotton. At one time there was a serious anticipation that oil would be discovered in the county, and a number of prospectors invested considerable sums of money and time in the effort to find a vein of silver that could be mined to gain fabulous riches.
For many years, at least from the late 1870s through the 1920s, apple orchards prevailed in our area as the king of crops and the greatest of economic boons.
Benton County apples were in demand all over the nation and Pea Ridge supplied its share of the apples. It was apples that brought the Frisco Railroad into our area, bringing about new towns like Avoca, Brightwater, Rogers and Garfield. Pea Ridge was bypassed by the path of the railroad, but still found a fairly accessible railroad connection with the depot at Avoca. My own greatgrandparents apparently moved to the area between Pea Ridge and Garfield soon after 1900 to produce apples. Great-granddad John Nichols was, to some extent, a traditional general farmer, but primarily hewas an apple orchard man.
My family used the railroad to ship apples, cattle for the market and cream for making butter in the cities.
By the time I was born in 1940, the apple industry had greatly declined, and farming was turning more to cattle, hogs, dairy and to the next big new boon, poultry. But there were still quite a number of apple orchards to be found in our area. I especially remember buying apples from an orchard just north of Rogers on the highway to Pea Ridge. Today the Nabholtz Company is located where that old orchard grew. I especially remember their Golden Delicious apples and Jonathan apples. Unless I remember wrongly, we used to peel and eat the Golden Delicious, and we made pies and apple butter out of the Jonathans. I also remember orchards south of Rogers, across from today’s Southgate Shopping Center and between Lowell and Springdale.
Today, I guess the only remaining sizable orchards are the Vansandt’s Orchard northeast of Springdale on Arkansas Highway 264, and the Renali Farms Orchards on U.S. Highway 412 west of Tontitown. They are good places to go!
I still like my apple butter on bread for breakfast.
I keep apple butter cold in the refrigerator, and spread it on homemade sourdough bread. What a way to start a good day! I grew up with the idea that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Well, I still have to go to the doctor now and then, but I still like my apple a day!
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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 08/31/2011