This past week has been full of reunions for our family. On Friday evening we held my wife Nancy's class reunion at the School Heritage Building in downtown Pea Ridge. This was the 1958 graduating class for Pea Ridge High School. I think they are probably the champion class of all years for regularly and unfailingly holding class reunions.
For many years, from 1963 and forward, they have held reunions every five years. About five years ago, with several class members having passed on, they decided to have a class reunion every year. Their reunions also involve two of us from the Class of 1957, J.W. Jordan and myself, since our wives are members of the Class of 1958. Members of these classes were always rather close, many having gone through school together through all 12 years of elementary school and high school. The small size of the Pea Ridge School in the 1940s and 1950s made it possible for everybody in school to know almost everyone else who attended school, from first grade through 12th grade.
The Heritage Building is a very memory-evoking place, since most of us can still point to where we used to sit for meals at noon in the old "hot lunch room" during school days.
Then, on Saturday morning and early afternoon, we held Pea Ridge High School Alumni Day 2016, which is an all-years reunion of students of Pea Ridge schools, including graduates from all years, other students who at any time attended school at Pea Ridge, teachers, administrators and office personnel from previous years. I thoroughly enjoyed visiting with PRHS alumni from the years, ranging from the mid-1930s to the present. We also enjoyed short visits with five of the nine Alumni Scholarship recipients for 2016, hearing about their plans for college, their vocational plans, and so on. Since 2007, the PRHS Alumni Association has supported an increasing number of PRHS graduates in beginning their college careers, by providing scholarship grants to help with their first year of college.
Finally, we capped the weekend of reunions with the Patterson family reunion, which was held Saturday evening at Derry and Sharon Camp's Auction house on East Pickens Road. There have been Patterson families in the Pea Ridge area from the time of the town's beginnings in the mid-1800s, so it is often amazing and illuminating to see again how many people across the area have Patterson family connections. My wife Nancy is the middle daughter of Ray and Zula Patterson, who lived for many years on the farm on Cardin Creek on Patterson Road northeast of Pea Ridge. Ray raised broilers on the farm, and in his later years co-managed the Pea Ridge Canning Plant, working with Marvin Dean.
The old canning plant closed in the late 1970s after a disastrous fire, and today's Ridge Community Church now occupies the location. Ray and Zula's first daughter, Peggy Patterson, married Daryle Greene of Twelve Corners. They lived mostly in the St. Louis area, and had four children. Peggy now has family spread over the country from Georgia to Washington state, with several great-grandchildren. Nancy and I have two children, with our son and his wife living in central Iowa, and our daughter and family having recently moved to Pea Ridge. Our sister-in-law Linda Schooley and her husband Clint Schooley had two boys, both of whom live in the Pea Ridge and Seligman areas, and their branch of the family includes several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
I am reminded that many of the early settlers of our Pea Ridge area came here by wagon train, accompanied by numerous other relatives and friends. That would be the norm, so our town and community started not as an accumulation of disconnected individuals, but as groups of closely-connected families and friends. Family connections were very much valued, and often were quite important to the ongoing survival and prosperity of the people who came here. Often they helped one another with seasonal farm work, such as putting up hay and harvesting corn, and quite often they banded together for building houses and barns and lodge halls and church buildings. So getting together to socialize, share big dinners, singings and other musical affairs was a natural thing to go along with seeing one another through the heavy labor seasons, or through emergencies when injury or illness disabled a family member.
So, family and neighborhood get-togethers, centered around work, or on renewing connections, or on just enjoying life together, has long been a part of family and community life in the Pea Ridge community.
To be continued.
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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. The opinions expressed are those of the author. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 07/20/2016