We lived away from Pea Ridge for many years, from 1962 until 2002, and it is pretty amazing to compare the Pea Ridge of the earlier years to the Pea Ridge of today. I commonly think of town center Pea Ridge today as being the intersection of Arkansas Highways 94 and 72, the Curtis Avenue/Lee Town Road intersection.

In the days prior to the mid-1950s, most of us Pea Ridgers thought of our town as basically the business strip along Pickens Street east and west, beginning at Davis Street on the east, and extending west to today’s Pea Ridge Outlet Store. We thought of the downtown street as our Main Street, but Idon’t know that the street was ever officially given a name. The north part of town consisted of a few houses along today’s Pike Street behind and west of the schoolgrounds. The south part of town extended from Sisco Funeral Home to the Pea Ridge Canning Plant, which was located where the New Life Church is now situated, across from the Church of Christ and across from Collier Drug. In the days before 1950, the Canning Plant and the Collier’s Drugstore location were outside of town.

It was in 1950 that changes began to stir.

Paved highways came to our town. State Highway 94 from Rogers was paved, and sections of it were relocated. Before 1950, the road to Rogers was what we now call Ryan Road.

To go to Rogers from downtown Pea Ridge, you drove south on the “main drag south,” turned right on what today is PattonStreet, west to what we now call Carr Street, south to State Hwy. 72, right on the highway and immediately left onto Ryan Road.

We always called it the Rogers Highway. The new highway construction in 1950 created what we now call Curtis Avenue. All of State Hwy. 94 from Pea Ridge to the Tucks Chapel Road two miles south was relocated at that time.

For a time in the early 1950s, we had a drive-in movie theater at State Hwy. 94 and Lee Town, where Arrest Bank of Pea Ridge now sits. About the mid-1950s, Jack and Joe Lasater moved their service station and car sales business to the other corner of the State Hwys. 94/72 intersection. Today’s White Oak Station stands where Lasater Station was. The Lasater brothers had done business on the site where the Park Motel is now on Pickens downtown. Many of us wondered at the timewhy they were moving their station so far out of town!

Maybe Jack and Joe had more foresight than any of us imagined, since today that intersection has become town center for Pea Ridge, the hub of our street system, the hub of our financial district, and the hub of much local business enterprise.

Today, my wife and I live in the Windmill addition of Pea Ridge. Our house sits out in the middle of Mr. Victor Miller’s hayfield. It looks like a suburban neighborhood today, but until 2005, “day before yesterday,” it was a farm field. Mr. Miller’s windmill was, I think, one of the first automatic watersystems in this area. His windmill pumped water from his well into a large nearby storage tank there on the farmstead, and he ran pipes to the farmhouse and to a neighbor’s house.

So they had running waterin the house. That was a novel thing back before World War II. Especially if you had hot AND cold running water, you were really getting up-town.

Probably only the bank president, W.T. Patterson, had that advanced kind of water system. Those were the days before “city water.”

One of the earliest businesses that I really remember in Pea Ridge was Webb’s Hatchery, which operated across from the school grounds in the little building east across the alley from today’s City Hall.

It used to be painted in the checkerboard pattern that represents Purina Feeds.

My granddad, Scott Nichols, retired from the farm in about 1945 and went to work for Webb’s as their “hatchery man.” Grandpa checked the eggs, operated the incubators, and cared for the little chicks as they hatched. He also sometimes helped withthe poultry testing out on the farms, along with Fred McKinney and others.

At the time of my first memories, I don’t remember any businesses at all in the building that is now City Hall. Mr. Charlie Tetrick had earlier had a produce store there, but he was retired by the time that I knew him. Our doctor, Dr. Lee Green, used to have his office in the upper story of that building. In those earlier days, it was very common for doctors and dentists to have upstairs offices. I’ll probably reminisce more next week about businesses that used to be, in old downtown Pea Ridge.

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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 09/07/2011