Old farm road signs remembered

While looking through an old newspaper, we happened onto a picture of a road sign of a type that we used to see quite often years ago: a sign at the turnoff onto a country road. In form it was a simple wooden post, with quite a number of narrow cross signboards giving the names of family homes and farms one would pass along that road. Quite often the sign boards would be painted white, and the names would be written in black. These signs were not duplicated along the way, but were only located at the intersection where one turned onto the road.

Also, during the same period of time when I remember those farm road signs, we had a large sign in Pea Ridge announcing that you were in Pea Ridge: "The Biggest Little City in Arkansas!" I'm not sure why we don't still make that claim. We are even bigger now, having progressed from about 200 in population when we first started publicizing ourselves as the biggest little city, to about 4,800 in population now. Of course, there are other little cities around the area which have grown just as we have, some of them even more rapidly. I'm thinking of Lowell and Centerton. Little Flock was more a community and church than a town, but the people of that area decided they didn't want to be absorbed by Rogers, so they started developing an outreaching town of their own. Somewhat like the old farm road signs, our "Biggest Little City" sign listed most of the businesses that were operating in our town at the time. In 1950, one could practically list all or most of the businesses in town on one large sign. That would not be practical now, since we have many more business places around Pea Ridge.

The old farm road signs would not be practical any more either, since our roads are not so much roads out among the farms now, but are more like streets running past residences, many of them located in subdivisions which used to be farms. For example, what is now Reed Street used to be basically a farm lane, leading to the back side of the Luther Martin farm. Jack and Imogene Lasater had their house about halfway down that lane. As I recall early on, that was the only house on the lane. The lane ended at a farm gate into the Martin farm. I used to take that lane as a shortcut when I walked home from school, climbing over the gate and crossing Mr. Martin's pasture to reach the corner in our road near what is now Pea Ridge City Park. Today, most of the Martin farm is a housing development, including McNair Street, Park Circle, Chapman Street, and Ford Street. Back in the 1950s, you might drive a mile on our road to Jacket, Mo., and pass only four or five houses. Today, many of the old farm fields are house sites.

In those earlier days, I don't remember very many named streets or roads around Pea Ridge. We used to refer to roads mainly by where they took you if you traveled them. We had the road to Rogers, the road to Bentonville, the road to Jacket, the road to Twelve Corners and the road to Garfield. The farm roads tended to be described as the road to the Pete Walker place, or the road to Lester Hickman's, or Jim Jefferson's road. I didn't grow up thinking of Lee Town Road as Lee Town. I would learn about Lee Town much later. To us, that was the Buttram's Cemetery Road, or the road to Central School, and to me it was the road to Aunt Anna's house. Aunt Anna used to live on a stretch of the Old Wire Road running west from Pratt Cemetery, south and west of the Pea Ridge battlefield. The old Nichols' homeplace there is about to be made into the new expanded U.S. Highway 62, running from Brightwater to Garfield.

Even within Pea Ridge, we didn't give streets names early on. We kind of informally thought of what is now Pickens Street as the main street of town, and what is Curtis Avenue today was thought of as the main drag south. What we call Davis Street today was sometimes thought of as the street to the Presbyterian Church, or the street past the Methodist Church, or the road past the Hugh Webb place. Our Weston Street was basically the road past the Oscar Webb farm. The north wing of our Pea Ridge Middle School now occupies the site of Oscar Webb's house and barn.

The Pea Ridge rural free delivery area (RFD) used to be served by a single mail route. We were all on Route 1, Pea Ridge, if we lived outside town. We didn't have house numbers, although after I left home, they started giving rural box numbers to people outside the city. So your address might be Route 1, Box 255, Pea Ridge, Ark. That was before zip codes were invented, and before the Arkansas abbreviation was changed to AR. The mail carriers pretty much knew everyone on the mail route, so they didn't really need house numbers or box numbers, or even farm road signs. The mail carriers I especially remember from that time were Ezra Ricketts, Solly Ricketts and Max Walker. Back then we had penny postcards, and you paid 3 cents for a postage stamp for a letter.

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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. The opinions of the writer are his own, and are not necessarily those of The Times.

Editorial on 07/09/2014