Ten years ago I would have predicted that there would not be a Walmart in Pea Ridge in my lifetime. Now, I'm hearing that Pea Ridge Walmart Neighborhood Market is to be opening in mid-July. The work is moving right along on the new store building and grounds, and from all indications, the July opening looks very realistic. There apparently will be a main entrance from Slack Street and a side entrance off Carr Street.
Having become an old-timer, I pre-date Walmart by several years. When I was growing up in the 1940s, downtown Pea Ridge had three stores which could be called general stores, or grocery and feed stores. The oldest was the Kelly & Dona Armstrong Store, which operated in the early 1900s white frame building on today's Pickens Street. That was Richardson's Grocery in the 1950s, and more recently has been the Pea Ridge Outlet Store. The second store was the Luther and Gertie Martin General Merchandise, the red brick store built in 1928, located at the southwest corner of today's North Curtis Avenue and Pickens Street. The newer grocery and feed store was the C.H. Mount Store, which today is Turner's Upholstery Shop. Mr. Mount built that building in 1948, on the site of the old Harve Ricketts Blacksmith Shop and Cooperage.
We regularly purchased goods from these Pea Ridge stores, and from Webb's Feed & Seed; usually going to town on Saturdays. When we needed to go to a bigger town, we made the rounds to Bentonville and Rogers, a full day's trip. Going to Bentonville, to me, meant going to the Ben Franklin Store on the west side of the square. The Ben Franklin Store was a "variety store," sometimes known as a "Five and Dime." I thought of the Ben Franklin Store as "MY" store, since they sold nearly everything I needed, like candy and crayons and Big Chief tablets and toy trucks. My mother also bought napkins and handkerchiefs and washcloths and towels and needles and thread and material by the yard; so you see the Ben Franklin Store was very important to us. In 1950, Mr. Sam Walton moved to Bentonville from Newport, Ark. He up and bought MY store, and it became Waltons. I thought I had lost my store, but to my relief Mr. Sam kept selling many of the things I needed.
In 1962, about the time I and my family were moving to Conway County as a church pastor, Mr. Sam opened the very first Walmart Store, in Rogers, Ark. He termed it "Discount City." The store building was located on the north side of West Walnut, near Eighth Street. The building still stands today, but is no longer owned by Walmart. The Rogers Walmart eventually moved a block farther west on West Walnut, and expanded there. Still later, the Rogers Walmart Supercenter was built farther out on West Walnut, at about 24th Street. The Walmart Company invented the Sam's Store in 1983, and the Supercenter in 1988. Sam Walton didn't invent the discount store. There were large high-volume discount stores before Walmart, such as KMart, Gibsons Discount and Sears Roebuck, but Mr. Sam seems to have carried the idea to its retailing heights, marketing goods made all over the world in stores all over the world.
The new Pea Ridge Walmart Neighborhood Market, located in the 200 block of Slack Street, occupies land which through the many years has been farm land owned by the Miller family. In fact, most of the land situated between Carr Street and Weston Street has long been Miller family land, owned by the Victor Miller family and the Bryant Miller family. In the days before 1950, all the land south of Patton Street was out of town to the south, and the Miller land tracts were also out of town. In 1950, when Arkansas Highway 94 was relocated to its present day Curtis Avenue route, it was as though Pea Ridge started spilling over to the south, eventually pouring westward toward Bentonville. I used to think of Patton Street as the south edge of Pea Ridge, and Weston Street as the west edge of Pea Ridge. But, today, I'm feeling that I am entering Pea Ridge as I pass Dr. Karen Sherman's Animal Clinic at Dove Road and It'll Do Road; or as I come north up Easley Hill from the Little Sugar Creek bridge.
When Sam Walton moved to Bentonville in 1950, the Bentonville population was about 2,900 people, and Rogers had about 5,000. Today, Pea Ridge is a much bigger town than Bentonville was back then, and almost as big as the Rogers of that day. Have you heard that Pea Ridge has one of the 10 best schools in Arkansas?
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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.
Editorial on 06/25/2014