PEA RIDGE — For some weeks now, I have been working on renovating some of the buildings on the home farm where I grew up. The first project was a carport connected to the house.
The carport had been built in the 1960s after I left home, but it was built as a flat-roofed structure, and like many flat roofs, it didn’t hold up very well.
Our current project is the old garage, a building that my dad built in 1948, with a little help from me. I was 8 years old at the time, and I wasn’t much help;
but I could pound in a few nails. I was pleased that Dad let me nail on some of the decking boards even though my hammering sometimes resulted in a bent nail. I think I have improved quite a bit as a carpenter, but my hammer still seems to bend a nail now and then.
I have just been remembering that the garage came about as a second thought, because a previous effort hadn’t worked out. As I have worked on my recent projects, I seem to change the plan from time to time; sometimes because someone offers an Idea that looks much better than the original plan, or because something just didn’t work out as expected. Switching plans can be frustrating, but I’m not feeling too bad about going to a new idea if a previous plan comes up short, since that is how we came to build this old garage in the first place.
Back when I was first beginning to realize that I was in the world, in 1943-44, Dad was just finishing up some of the new farm buildings that we would use for years to come. The big barn had been completed, a new hen house was in place on the far side of the garden, and a brooder house for new little chickens was shaping up between the house and barn. Dad decided that it would be great to have a shed for the car on the far side of the brooder house.
We had quite a bit of new oak lumber which had been cut from the farm and sawed into boards by Ray Patterson. So Dad set to work adding the car shed onto the brooder house. We had just traded cars with Floyd Hall, who at the time operated the Esso Station in town. We traded our 1938 Ford for a 1937 Chevrolet sedan.
The ’37 Chevy was a pretty good car, and although it was nearly 10 years old when we got it, it was still our “new” car. Very few people in those days had truly new cars, but ours was “new to us,” and when you have a new car, even if it is strictly speaking not quite new, you want to take care of it and keep it under roof.
I remember that after finishing the shed’s sheet iron roof, Dad brought the car around to try out the new shelter. But as he drove the front of the car under the shed, he suddenly stopped and backed out again. I hadn’t seen anything wrong, so I asked him why didn’t he drive on in? “Well,” he said, “if I had driven on in I would have broken off the radio antenna.” The car radio antenna was too tall for our new shed. Today, our car radios seem to get by with tiny, hidden antennas; but back then you had to have a pretty tall antenna in order to pick up your stations.
In planning for the new car shed, we had overlooked the radio antenna.
The new shed would never hold a car. Well, not to be stymied, that spurred Dad on to go ahead and build a nice garage up by the house, where the old smokehouse had stood earlier.
The second plan was much better than the first, and that nice garage built In 1948 has servedwell. The only problem is that it was new and nice 64 years ago. The roof needed replacing, some siding was bad, new doors were needed, some of the trim was rotten and the whole structure was thirsty for paint. We have the repairs and renovation coming along pretty well, and I think it will soon look good again. I’ll have to admit that it gets to me to see buildings that were new when I was a boy now looking old and dilapidated. It is right gratifying to see some of them getting back in good shape again.
Even our old misplanned car shed found better uses later on. It became our harness shed and equipment shed, mak-Ing harnessing the horses much easier. In later years, when we no longer had horses, it became the spreader shed, housing the manure spreader - that great technological advance over the old manure fork, such an elegant piece of equipment considering the kind of work it saved.
Interestingly, the nice garage didn’t always get to house the car. Sometimes the tractor and mower crowded out the car. That eventually led to the carport, and so on and on. I guess life often doesn’t turn out exactly as planned, but the Lord provides, and things have a way of working out.
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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 02/22/2012