Hugh Webb’s long-enduring business celebrated

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

— I notice in the newspaper that on Sept. 30, Webb’s Feed and Seed Store will celebrate 75 years in historic downtown Pea Ridge.

The store was opened in 1936 by Hugh Webb. That was four years before I was born, so obviously I have never known Pea Ridge without Webb’s Feed and Seed. In my early years, Webb’s Hatchery also operated across the alley east of the store. I think Hugh Webb began in the electric hatchery business on his farm west of town even before he opened the businesses in town.

Webb’s Feed and Seed has changed considerably from the store I remember in the 1940s and 1950s. One of the pictures in the Sept. 28 Times shows that Webb’s then occupied two storefronts. In those days, the main store was where Bobby Schooley later had his cabinet shop, and the part used by the store today was the truck entrance. When a newtruckload of feed came in, the truck would back into the building and down an incline, putting the truck bed at floor level. That made for less lifting of the feed sacks, but it still took a great deal of hand work and manpower. Fred McKinney once told me that on the first day he worked for Hugh Webb in 1940, he was assigned to unload a full truckload of feed; no small task for one fellow just out of high school. Apparently Fred didn’t mind the work;

he stuck with it, and soon married Mabel, Hugh and Nell Webb’s daughter. Fred has been with the company for some 70 years, and he and Mabel have owned the store for many years now.

I remember that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a number of other men wereassociated with the store and hatchery. I am bound to leave people out, but I remember men like Russell Walker, Wilson “Hoss” Webb, John Dryden, Floyd Henson, Gene Henson, Solon McGinnis, Daryle Green, W.S. Nichols and others.

Even as a boy I was fascinated with the equipment people used in their work, and the feed store caught my imagination. They used antique-looking dollies to carry sacks of feed out to our trucks or cars. Many of us actually filled the trunks of our cars with bags of feed for the cows and chickens and Fred McKinney or one of the other men would roll the load out front for us. They still usesome dollies that look like those from the 1940s, but these may be newer. They also had some fascinating scales around the store.

I especially remember a metal scale with a flat bed, large enough to weigh several big bags of feed stackedup. It used a sliding weight on a balance beam, along with weights on a hanger.

You stacked the round slotted weights on the hanger to set up the scale to weigh a load. There were also several balance type scales with bright metal pans for weighing seed.

I remember that Webb’s sold us baby chickens in cardboard boxes about 3-feet square. We would take them home and put them around a brooder stove to keep them warm. We were one of many farm families who raised laying hens and sold hatching eggs to Webb’s Hatchery. The hatchery provided broilers to our poultry farmers. The ventures of Webb’s Feed and Seed became a majorforce in expanding the poultry industry in northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri. As the great apple industry faded after 1930, poultry farms became a great mainstay of the Benton County economy.

I take it that in the 1950s,when Hugh Webb could rely on Mabel and Fred to operate the businesses, he became involved in the administration of the Bank of Pea Ridge and in the city’s civic affairs. He was vicepresident and loan officer of the bank for many years.

Hugh was also active in the Kiwanis Club and Chamber of Commerce and helped establish the Pea Ridge city Water Department and Fire Department.

In the late 1940s, Hugh was president of the Pea Ridge School Board at a critical time. In 1949, the state legislature enacted legislation to consolidate all school districts with fewer than 300 students. I think our school then had about 200 students. After a failed attempt to consolidate Garfield School with Pea Ridge, Mr. Webb negotiated an agreement with Sulphur Springs School District to form a combined district under a county superintendent.

That move preserved Pea Ridge High School for the years ahead. Now that Pea Ridge Schools today have grown to more than 1,600 students, that effort in 1949 surely looks like great foresight by Hugh Webb and others.

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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 10/05/2011