Now & Then

Appreciating Little Otter Creek and other sources of water

— I have learned to appreciate the little creek north of Pea Ridge a great deal more in the past several years. I grew up on Otter Creek, about two miles downstream from Pea Ridge.

The creek was many things to us - a serene and scenic stream, a place to fish, a place to swim, a place to water our cows, a place to skip flat rocks across the water pools, a place to catch frogs, a place to watch the water skippers, a place to wade, a place to wash the car, a place to watch and listen to the water trickling over the rocks, a place to find water cress, crawdads and water moccasins and other snakes. Although I have never seen an otter on Otter Creek, I suppose there must have been otters in years gone by. That must have given it the name, Otter Creek. In theearly days of Pea Ridge, there was an old wagon and buggy road which followed the creek north of Pea Ridge. The old road merged into today’s Hayden Road where it passes our farmstead. The only part of that old road remaining today is Clark Street in the north part of Pea Ridge, reaching out to Doug McKinney’s walnut hulling operation.

Otter Creek runs right through the middle of our farm, and much of the farm work we did involved crossing the creek. When we went to bring in the cows in the evening, we had to cross the creek. In fact, we crossed two creeksto go after the cows in the back pasture. On the east side of the farm we have a wet-weather creek which emptied into Otter Creek at the north boundary of our farm. That creek bed originates on Patterson Road about a mile northeast of Pea Ridge. It handles runoff from the roads and farms east of Patterson Road. Most of the time it is a dry creek, and we always called it the dry creek.

We often had a footlog below the barn for crossing Otter Creek into our bottomland fields. When rains are heavy, Otter Creek rises mightily, and sometimes it turns into a raging torrent. It used to wash away our footlog, even when Dad tied the log to a post with a chain.

It still amazes me that such a tranquil, peaceful creek can become so powerful, fast and destructive.

We had several crossing places on the creek, and sometimes we would intentionally place sizeable rocks in the stream, spaced apart as stepping stones for crossing the creek. Despite my best efforts to get the stepping stones right, I usually ended up slipping off into the water and saturating my shoes and socks.

When I was very young, I didn’t think of Otter Creek as particularly important or significant, but as time has gone by I have a greater sense of its importance to Pea Ridge. The two water springs which supply the headwaters for Otter Creek’s flow probably established the location of the early village of Pea Ridge. One spring is on Green Street, and the second is the larger Morrison Spring, located north of town near the water treatment plant, on property owned by the McKinney family. Those springs were likely the earliest water supply for families who settled in Pea Ridge in the mid-1800s.

Today, the two Otter Creek headwater springs no longer supply households with water, but Otter Creek carries nearly all the runoff water from the vicinity of Pea Ridge, including the farmland east reaching to the Military Park, the lands along Lee Town Road and the land reaching west as far as It’ll Do Road. It is a major tributary in the Big Sugar Creek watershed, which feeds into the Elk River at Pineville, Mo., and flows into northeast Oklahoma.

Sometimes, I think we suppose that when the water we use runs down our drain, it is just gone. But that water has to go somewhere, andthat somewhere is Otter Creek, Big Sugar Creek and the Elk River. Towns like Pea Ridge have to be water recyclers. We are doing a pretty good job of recycling the water we use and sending it on its way to Oklahoma. Just as we need to pay attention to the source of our water supply, Beaver Lake, we need for our future to pay attention to the lower end of our water flow, our little Otter Creek. It is really vital to our future as a growing town, and to our downstream neighbors in Missouri and Oklahoma.

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, 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 11/16/2011