PEA RIDGE — I have written before about growing up in a time just after the Great Depression of the 1930s, when it was very common for people to build new buildings with materials salvaged from older structures that were being dismantled. In the 1940s it was a respected value to be conserving of good pieces of used lumber. Wastefulness was considered to be a moral flaw. To just throw away something that someone might make good use of was seen as irresponsible, thoughtless and as being ungrateful for the resources that one was blessed with. People from the 1930s and 1940s may have a hard time today being comfortable with a society that practices and condones throw-a-way lifestyles.
Over the past several months I have been involved in repairing and renovating some of thefarm buildings that our family built in the 1940s and 1950s. Last spring, as we were redoing the roof of the milk barn which we built in 1954, we came across a first layer of green shingles that we had salvaged from our old house.
Our old house was probably almost 100 years old when we took it down in 1953, getting ready to build our new farmhouse, but the green roof shingles were not very old. So, the first task my dad assigned to me as we started taking down the old house was to get up on the roof and take off those shingles, one by one, and save them to be used later. We didn’t always know what we would use them for, we just knewthat they were pretty good shingles, and that they would be useful for other building projects later. I had actually forgotten that we roofed our new milking barn with those green salvaged shingles back when I was 14 years old. It felt strange to be handling them again nearly 60 years later, almost as if I was in a time warp and it was 1954 again.
The very first elementary classrooms for the Pea Ridge School located outside the 1930 school building were provided by a white frame building placed near the northeast corner of the main building. In about 1948, the “little white building” as we called it, started out to provide classroom space for the third and fourth grades, alleviating the crowding that was developing in the main building. More students were coming into Pea Ridgeas outlying rural schools like Twelve Corners and Central (Leetown) were consolidated with the Pea Ridge district. The “little white building” was mostly built of materials that came from the barracks of old Camp Crowder in Neosho, Mo. Camp Crowder was a World War I Army Air Corp Training facility.
Many other construction projects around Pea Ridge in the late 1940s benefited from materials salvaged from Camp Crowder, including the old Lodge Hall/E.H. Building which today houses the Pea Ridge Historical Society Museum. Even the chapel building from Camp Crowder came to the Pea Ridge area. In 1947, a tornado almost completely destroyed the town of Brightwater, demolishing the church and most of the homes. The Brightwater church people obtained the chapel building at Camp Crowder, andit was dismantled, moved to the Brightwater area, and reassembled on the east side of U.S. Hwy. 62 near Little Sugar Creek just north of Avoca, where it served the Methodist congregation for decades.
It is with some consternation and sorrow that some of us old-timers see those old time-honored conservative practices of dismantling and salvaging fall out of favor over the years. The meticulous and careful dismantling of an old building is, of course, very demanding of man hours of labor. Today, we can’t afford to do it that way. So, commonly that labor-intensive old practice is replaced by a backhoe or a dinosaur-jawequipped machine which demolishes everything, using the smash and crunch and haul-it-to-the-landfill method.
Right now on the farm we are building some storage shelves in the old milk barn, using boards that I have saved over the years from different structures that were being dismantled. Some people seem to think of salvaged materials as automatically inferior, and some may even think of people like me as hoarders because we “save stuff that might be used for something.” At the same time, as we move ahead in “improving” our way of life as a people, it seems to me that we need to come to terms with the wastefulness of our practices in handling the resources that we are blessed with.
◊◊◊
Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, 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 10/10/2012