For quite a number of years, the Pea Ridge Post Office has been located midway between the Arkansas Highway 94 and Arkansas Highway 72 intersections (both north and south) at the intersection of North Curtis Avenue with Patton Street. It seems a natural location now that the years have passed. Locations and buildings often come to feel like they have always been the way they are, especially after years of familiarity. But, for our old-timers, memories remind us that things haven't always been the way they are now, and that across the years institutions such as our Post Office have gone through many changes.
The Post Office is intricately tied to the origins the town of Pea Ridge. Various towns have their beginnings associated with certain events. Bentonville in it's beginnings is tied to the 1836 origins of the State of Arkansas and the forming of Benton County. The origin of Rogers is tied to the building of the St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad. Rogers is named after a railroad official, and its "birthday," May 10, 1881, marks the arrival of the first train on the newly completed railroad.
Pea Ridge, on the other hand, is named after the plateau on which it lies, an area which in the early 1800s was marked by lush growths of wild peas. The northwest Arkansas area, which long had been Osage Indian territory, was opened to white settlement in 1828, and the village which would become Pea Ridge began to be settled by people arriving by wagon train from the eastern states, many from Tennessee. During the 1830s and 1840s mail for the village was dropped off at Elkhorn Tavern by Pony Express riders or by the Butterfield stagecoaches, traveling on the Old Wire Road. Mail was picked up at Elkhorn Tavern and delivered by horseback or horsedrawn mail cart. On Aug. 5, 1850, the first U.S. Post Office was established in Pea Ridge. The U.S. Postal Service at first had the town's name as "Pearidge," but that was soon changed to the two words, Pea Ridge, by which our town has been known for the 167 years since 1850.
I have never been able to locate specifically where the first Pea Ridge Post Office was operated, but evidently in the early years the Post Office occupied a section of an existing business. This was quite common for new towns in the 19th Century. The Post Office might occupy a corner of the general store. The earliest mapped location I have come across for the Pea Ridge Post Office is seen in a 1903 map. The map indicates a building at the northwest corner of the main downtown intersection as the Post Office. That building was a two-story building which apparently housed downstairs businesses, but had upstairs hotel rooms for rent. The "central" office of the community's first "party-line" telephone system occupied one of those upstairs hotel rooms. This early hotel building stood at the northwest corner of the intersection until 1930, when it was replaced by the Pea Ridge Day Station, the picturesque field rock gas station which many remember as a Texaco Station operated by Floyd Hall, and later by Roger Hickman.
The second location of the post office that we can definitely identify is in a picture on display at the Pea Ridge Historical Society Museum, showing the east block of downtown Pea Ridge in about 1910. The post office at that time was located between two major store buildings, the Putman Store at the southeast corner of the intersection, and the J.R. Wheat Store, located about where Webbs Feed and Seed stands today. During the years 1910 to 1930, the post office may have continued in the east block as part of one of the store buildings there, or it may have moved to the Foster Grocery Store on the southwest corner of the intersection. In 1911, with the establishment of the Bank of Pea Ridge and construction of the bank building next to Putman's Store, the whole of the east block went through a rebuilding, so that by 1920 all the former wood frame store buildings were gone, and the structures we see today were in place as fine new masonry store buildings.
The next post office location we can pinpoint was in the red brick building complex which begins the west block of downtown. The initial red brick building is dated 1928. This was apparently when the Foster Grocery Store, a wood frame building, was moved across and down the street westward, where it later housed the Armstrong Cafe. Today it serves as office for a small construction company. The 1928 red brick structure had three sections, a grocery store, a barber shop, and the Post Office. In the 1930s and 1940s, the corner store was the Luther Martin Grocery (later Ropers), the barber was Jim Lasater (later Mike Edwards and others), and the postmaster was Finis Woods. (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, member of the Pea Ridge Alumni Association and vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. Opinions expressed are those of the writer. He can be contacted by email at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 08/02/2017