The pea ridge before Pea Ridge

Occasionally someone will ask, How did our town of Pea Ridge get its name? To me, the origin of town names in Arkansas is a curious pursuit. We certainly have some unusual names for towns across the state. A few towns, like Evening Shade, Ark., have had the fortune, good I suppose, to become widely known, through a television show. Probably lesser known would be such small towns as Oil Trough, Ark., or Round Pond, Ark. Many towns and cities that we are familiar with are named after well-known persons. For example, Benton County and Bentonville are named after a prominent Missouri politician named Thomas Benton, who was influential in getting Arkansas admitted to the union as a state in 1836. The city of Rogers was named after an official of the St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad, who was influential in bringing the railroad through Rogers in the early 1880s.

Interestingly, Pea Ridge was named from the ridge on which the small village began to form in the 1830s and 1840s. A prominent feature "on the ridge" was a profusion of pea vines, of a variety sometimes known as Hog Peanuts or Turkey Peas. The peas on the ridge produced not only a pea pod, but also an underground tuber like a peanut, both of which were edible for people and livestock. So, there was a ridge of peas in this area long before white settlers began arriving in the 1830s and 1840s to establish the original little village of Pea Ridge. The pea ridge from which the town was named is actually a fairly size-able area, bounded on the south by the Little Sugar Creek valley, on the north by Big Sugar Creek, on the east by Garfield, and on the west by Bella Vista. To me it seems a little unusual to refer to it as a ridge, since I usually think of a ridge as an extended backbone of a stretch of hills. An example of my normal conception of a ridge is Gann Ridge, which extends from the Twelve Corners and Corinth communities northeastward toward old Bayless and Gateway. It would seem as descriptive of our area to call it a plateau, rather than a ridge. But if you are driving from Bentonville toward Pea Ridge on Arkansas Hwy. 72, coming across the Little Sugar Creek Valley, you definitely see a ridge on the north of the valley, extending east and west.

Some time ago, my son Jeff and I were working on listings of soldiers from the Pea Ridge area who fought in various military units, Union and Confederate, during the Civil War. Jeff began noticing that in the early records, many of the men were described as "living on Pea Ridge." So, that became a guide to the decisions on whom to list. The resulting list, now displayed in the Pea Ridge Historical Museum, is a list of soldiers who were "living on Pea Ridge" in the 1860s. That was not saying that they lived "in Pea Ridge," the town, but "on Pea Ridge," all abroad over the wider area where the peas used to grow so prominently, and from which the town of Pea Ridge took its name. The town took on its official name in 1850, when a post office was established in town. At first it was called Pearidge, but soon the name was revised to Pea Ridge.

I used to have a preacher friend who always claimed he could tell who was a native of Pea Ridge and who was a transplant to the community by the way they pronounced the town's name. He said that the natives called the town Pearidge, like one word, with a heavy emphasis on the "Pea," but that new residents tended to say "Pea RIDGE" with emphasis on the "Ridge." I have never noticed such a difference, and I actually don't think it would hold true.

Looking at a recent map of the town of Pea Ridge and its city limits, it occurs to me that our town is gradually filling in the area of the "ridge" for which it is named. The whole area is being reshaped over time. Geologists tell us that our area was once under a shallow sea. Even as the land has risen above the water, the flow of springs and creeks and runoff from the land has carved our area into a great collection of ridges and valleys. I have a considerable interest in our area's watershed, which involves numerous creeks and branches, often having their own colorful names, names like Otter Creek, Carden Branch and Spanker Creek, each adding character to our "Ridge," the ridge of the peas.

•••

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.

Editorial on 06/04/2014