Joe Lasater is one of those men so long identified with Pea Ridge that it is going to be hard to imagine the town without him. But Joe passed away this past week, at 92 years old. Joe was a member of what we have come to call the great generation, men and women who were coming to maturity as World War II was beginning. Like many other young Pea Ridge men of the time, Joe enlisted in the country's military service in the war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Joe joined the U.S. Army Air Corp, which would soon be reorganized and renamed to become the U.S. Air Force. He was discharged from the Air Force early in 1946, after war's end, and returned to Pea Ridge, his hometown. His brother Jack Lasater had also served in the Army, where he had been a tank mechanic. Back in Pea Ridge, the two brothers entered into a business partnership to operate the Lasater Brothers Phillips 66 Station and Garage.
When I started to school in first grade at Pea Ridge School, the Lasater Brothers were starting their garage and filling station business across the street from the school. They began in an older building which had once been a mill, located at the intersection which we now call East Pickens and Davis Street. The Park Motel now occupies the site where the Lasater brothers did business for eight or nine years in the old traditional downtown which was Pea Ridge in those days. Back then, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, nearly all of the businesses in Pea Ridge were located in the downtown, along what is now Pickens Street, or on North Curtis where it intersects Pickens. The only exception I can think of was the Pea Ridge Canning Plant, which stood at the far south edge of town, across the street south of the Pea Ridge Church of Christ.
Pea Ridge had had several earlier garages and filling stations. The Pea Ridge Day Station operated in the little field-stone building at the main intersection. Luther Martin once had gas pumps in front of his grocery store. Johnny Buttry had a garage and gas pumps just north of the funeral home, selling DX products. Floyd Hall was operating the Day Station, and early on he sold ESSO gas and oil, but switched to Texaco about the time ESSO became EXXON. The Lasater Brothers Garage and Station seemed a success from the start, drawing customers, selling Phillips 66 gasoline, repairing and servicing cars and trucks. Joe also began selling used cars on the side.
As I recall, in about the mid-1950s the Lasater brothers did what I remember as an astonishing thing. They moved their business way out of town to the south, to the intersection where the new highway from Bentonville came together with the new highway from Rogers. Those highways into Pea Ridge were paved in the early 1950s, and the newly relocated Arkansas Highway 94 created Curtis Avenue as we know it today. Jack and Joe Lasater established their business on the northwest corner of the intersection, the site occupied today by the White Oak Station. Unless one includes the Aerodyne Drive-in Movie Theater, which in the early 1950s operated for a few years where the Arvest Bank now sits, the Lasater Brothers Garage and Station was the first business to open at the Hwy. 94/72 intersection. Many of us were puzzled when they moved out there, asking ourselves why they would want to move so far out of town. Their new location was a mile out of town, as we reckoned "town" in those days.
Business was pretty good in downtown Pea Ridge in those years after the war. There had been a flurry of new buildings. The Masonic Lodge built the Lodge Hall which would come to be called the E.H. Building, today's Pea Ridge Historical Museum. C.H. Mount had built his new grocery and feed store, now the Upholstery Shop. Charles Hardy had built his Garage and Station behind Luther Martin's Grocery Store, and was selling Lion gasoline and repairing cars in competition with the Lasater Brothers. New houses had begun going up along McCulloch Street. So, the town was growing. We had just not yet conceived of its growing all the way out to the highway intersection south.
Maybe Jack and Joe saw something that others of us were not seeing in the 1950s. Anyway, the result of their moving "out-of-town" was that the town started moving out there with them. Before long, the Pea Ridge Feed Mill was established across the street from their station, where the EZ Mart is now. By the late 1960s, even the Bank of Pea Ridge had moved to the south intersection. So, what had been our "south-of-town" intersection had become the new center of town.
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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 expressed are his own.
Editorial on 04/15/2015