It goes almost without saying that water is one of the essentials of life. For any flourishing community of people, an abundant source of water is an indispensable and wonderful blessing. I'm hearing that northwest Arkansas has become a great community of 500,000 people. And, I'm sure that many of them, if not most, are supplied with water from Beaver Lake. Our great towns of Springdale, Lowell, Rogers, Centerton, Bentonville and Pea Ridge could not be the growing towns they are today without water from the lake. Of course the lake came at great sacrifice to many families in the 1960s. Many families had to move from the lower lands that would be flooded by the lake waters; houses and churches and stores and post offices and cemeteries were moved to higher ground, and in some cases entire small towns and communities had to give way to the great reservoir which we now know as "The Lake."
In thinking of what a blessing an abundance of water is, I'm reminded of Psalm 84: "Blessed are those whose strength is in thee (the Lord). As they go through the valley of Baca, they make it a place of springs; the early rain also covers it with pools."
I'm also thinking of our own little valley which carries Otter Creek as it runs from the north side of Pea Ridge toward the Missouri line. I think of Otter Creek as a wonderful little valley of springs and streams! I grew up on a farm which is divided east and west by Otter Creek as it makes its meandering way northward from town. The Morrison Spring, which is located just over the first hill north of town, and which provides the major headwaters of Otter Creek, is probably one of the springs which encouraged the settlers to make our town their home back in the mid-1800s. A smaller spring, located off today's Greene Street, was also a water source which evidently made life possible in the early formative days of the village of Pea Ridge.
In thinking of the importance of our springs and streams, I'm also reminded that not only do communities like ours need a good strong source of water, we also need the streams which carry away the extra water which runs off from our streets and parking lots, and which drains from the fields all around our community, from It'll Do Road and Arkansas Hwy. 94 in the west, all the way to the Pea Ridge Battlefield in the east. That would be our grand little Otter Creek! It also gets to carry away the waters we send down the drains from all our houses and businesses. When the rains come, and the waters are running off from east to west, our little creek gets very busy with its task of carrying water. Without it, we would have to have a lake covering the Klauss Street valley and much of Greene Street, we'd need a lake east of town to catch the runoff out there, and several smaller lakes out around Shady Grove to the west-northwest.
Otter Creek is also fed by a sizeable spring on the Charles Day farm about three miles north of Pea Ridge, by Carden Branch (Carden Creek) which crosses Patterson Road in the valley northeast of town, and by numerous unnamed springs and wet-weather streams along the way. For our farm through the years, Otter Creek has been our essential source for watering the cattle. In the earlier days, the creek would often go dry in the summertime, and we might have to haul water from the Charles Day Spring. I remember what a life-saver that spring was for us in the extreme drought years of 1953 and 1954.
In the days before the Pea Ridge National Military Park I always enjoyed driving past the Winton Spring on Lee Town Road. In those days Lee Town Road didn't end at Arkansas Hwy. 72 in the east, it continued eastward, passing the Central School and the Winton Spring farm until it finally intersected with the Old Wire Road near U.S. Hwy 62. Winton Spring today is a small natural spring which is easily overlooked as one passes by it on the Military Park Tour Road, but in the 1940s and 1950s, Winton Spring was a large, beautiful spring with wide pools, and was outfitted with those fascinating water-powered pumps which were used in the days before electricity to pump water up the hill to the farmhouse. I think those pumps used an internal piston with a pressure cycle and a release cycle. They would work quietly for a minute or so as the water load built up inside and pumped a small portion of water into the lines, then they were tripped and the water load came gushing out. It was fascinating to watch them, all without the help of electricity or computers.
People often assume that our local streams eventually drain into the White River. But, not so. Our local streams, including Otter Creek, Carden Creek, Big Sugar, Little Sugar, Spanker Creek and Ford Creek, all eventually pour into Oklahoma's Elk River near Pineville, Mo. In fact, by our using "city water" from Beaver Lake, we are actually transferring White River water into the Elk River, via our city water systems and our many local creeks and tributaries. Let's appreciate those little streams all around us. They are important to us now as well as having been important to our ancestors back then.
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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 04/01/2015