This question came to me from my sister-in-law, Linda Schooley, after some members of the family inquired about the old downtown Pea Ridge building which now serves as the Pea Ridge Historical Society Museum.
The question comes from 1950s students of Pea Ridge High School. During their tenure at PRHS, the building which came to be known as the E.H. Building was the headquarters and classroom for the high school’s Home Economics Department.
Many high school girls in those days took Home Ec in this building across the street (west of the school property on North Curtis Avenue).
For the most part we boys were not involved in Home Ec, but I do remember some exchange days, when our Agri Shop class would swap places with the Home Ec class. In my time in school, Charles Brown was our Agri Shop teacher, and Mrs Clytis Ross was the Home Ec teacher. I guess the idea of the exchanges was to give us boys at least a little bit of finer culture. I rememberbeing taught how to set a table properly, how to place the fork left of the plate, and the knife and spoon to the right of the plate. That was about the size of my Home Ec education.
I’m not sure exactly which years the across the street building served as the Home Ec classroom. I think it began in the mid-1950s and continued into the 1960s. I assume that at least after the addition of the new elementary school building in 1971, the school was able to move Home Ec back into school-owned facilities.
My first memory of this building across from the school was when I was in second grade in Mabel Hardy’s room, during the 1947-1948 school year. It was then that the two-story concrete building was being erected by the Mt. Vernon Masonic Lodge. Pea Ridge saw a surgeof new buildings shortly after the end of World War II, and the Lodge Hall was one of the several. Others included the new Mt. Vernon Presbyterian Church, the new C.H.
Mount Grocery & Feed Store, and Charles Hardy’s new garage. Eva Patterson’s dry goods store had been built a little earlier, in 1946. So, our museum building was built and first owned by the Mt.
Vernon Masonic Lodge.
The building had a special connection to the Presbyterian Church project. The new church building was being built close behind the old church structure, whose front stood very near to Davis Street at the east end of today’s McIntosh Street. For several years, the Masonic Lodge had met in the upper story of the old church building. My Grandpa Scott Nichols joined the Lodge during those days. When the new church building wasnearing completion in 1947, the old church building was dismantled. In those days, old buildings normally were not razed by smashing andcrunching as we see done today. Usually they were taken down piece by piece, and good useable materials were saved for other uses. Interestingly, the massive upper floor joists of the old church building were removed intact, and were reused in constructing the new Lodge Hall downtown. So, even in their new building, the upper floor, where Lodge meetings were held, was supported by the same beams which had previously supported their upper-level meeting place in the old church building. And, of course, those great beams continue in service in today’s museum in 2011.
My understanding is that the early Masonic lodges commonly built their buildings for multiple uses by their community. Most frequently they built a two-story building, with the upper story designated for meetings of the Lodge, and they made the first floor available for a variety of community activities. The first Buttram Chapel building, built by the Masonic Lodge in the 1850s, was probably thePea Ridge community’s first example. At Buttram’s, the lower story provided a place for church services, and in 1874, the Pea Ridge Academy, the community’s first enduring school, was established and met there until 1879. In the new 1948 Lodge Building, the first floor room essentially served as Pea Ridge’s first in-town community building, providing facilities for club meetings, elections, banquets, family reunions, anniversary celebrations and such like. In the building’s early days, I remember annual Junior-Senior banquets being held there. If we had had a prom in those days (which we didn’t), that would probably have been held there, too. School classes in the ’40s and ’50s were much smaller than today. A typical senior class then was 10 to 12 people, so the 25-feet by 40-feet first-floor room could serve many functions quite well, even though it issmall by today’s standards.
After the Mt. Vernon Lodge merged with another Lodge in the mid-1950s, becoming the Pea Ridge Lodge withmeetinghouse at Brightwater, the downtown Lodge building became the E.H. Building.
It continued its multiple-use functions all through the years, as the Extension Homemakers Club made the building available not only for their own functions, but for school functions, and activities of other community organizations, such as the Beta Alpha Sorority, and others. To me it seems especially fitting and significant that this 64-year-old building, which has housed so many community and school activities through the years, should now work as a museum, highlighting the heritage of Pea Ridge, and educating the current generations.
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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.
The opinions of the writer are his own, and are not necessarily those of The Times.
Community, Pages 10 on 12/28/2011