The growth of farmer's markets in the communities of northwest Arkansas in recent years has been a very interesting development to me. I'm comparing the growers of today, who produce their goods in gardens and patches at home and bring their products to farmers' markets "in town," to the years ago folks I remember as the truck patchers of those days. Although in the years gone by almost everybody had a home garden, not everyone went to the greater extent to cultivate a truck patch, growing fresh produce for the market. These distinctions may not be precise, but I tend to think of a gardener as the person who cultivates a home garden plot to produce fresh produce for their own family. I think of a truck patcher as a person who devotes a small plot of ground, from an acre to a few acres, to growing garden-type produce, but which in this case is intended to be sold on the market.
A gardener may share things from the garden with others, friends, relatives, neighbors, church folk and the preacher, but usually the sharing is as a gift, with no charge. For example, my father-in-law, Ray Patterson, was a gardener, a major gardener. He cultivated a large garden at home on the farm, feeding the family in large measure from the garden. Even after he moved to town to live on Frost Street in Pea Ridge, he purchased a double residential plot so as to have room for a big garden. Not only that, he moved his tractor to town and he used to plow gardens for people. For some, he even planted and maintained the gardens on their properties. Much of what he produced he gave away. Ray loved to work gardens. He WAS a gardener. He may even have been a truck patcher in the early days, but not in the time that I have been part of the family. He did, however, become a part of the market for the local truck patchers. For several years he worked for Frank Strode, one of the later owners of the Pea Ridge Canning Plant. Along with his good friend, Marvin Dean, Ray worked as the buyer and manager for the Canning Plant, weighing in the loads of tomatoes on the truck scale on the north side of the building, and hiring workers to peel, cook, can, label and ship the tomatoes.
The Pea Ridge Cannery definitely supported a widespread group of truck patchers, who wanted to supplement their income by producing tomatoes for the market. The cannery, itself, was a source of supplementary income for many people around our community, providing seasonal employment during times when paying jobs were scarce. In my lifetime I have been aware only of our cannery as a processing plant for tomatoes. The plant canned tomatoes under a number of commercial brands. I have wondered if at one time they may have processed other foods as well as the tomatoes. I have never learned a precise date for the founding of the Pea Ridge Cannery, but evidently it came about in the early 1930s. Albert Putman and family were early owners. The cannery operated for many years, until a major fire in the late 1970s destroyed much of the facility. Since then, the site has had stores operating on the property, such as Snow's and Ash's. Today the site hosts The Ridge Community Church.
My impression has been that in recent years, local sources of fresh produce have declined, and our grocery suppliers have become dependent on fresh produce and other foods which are produced in distant places like California or Texas or Florida, and "shipped in" to our local grocery markets. In the early days, by which I refer to the 1930s and 1940s, the local stores might buy produce from local producers, local truck patchers. If you went to town to buy fresh sweet corn, or tomatoes, or carrots, or green beans, or cucumbers or watermelons or cantaloupes or strawberries, like as not the fresh goods had been grown by a local community truck patcher. One of our early Pea Ridge stores, probably opened a few years before 1920, was Tetrick Produce. Charlie Tetrick built the building which until recently has served our town as City Hall, and early on he operated the Tetrick Produce Store there. The upper story was added by Dr. Lee Greene, who was our local doctor from the 1920s to the 1940s.
It may be that our farming areas in northwest Arkansas are more suited for beef production and poultry production, and less so for the production of fresh produce. But it has never seemed like good sense to me to be depending on foods shipped in from a distant state, requiring the use of great amounts of fuel for the trains and trucks which handle the shipping. Local production makes more sense to me. Northwest Arkansas may no longer be a major fruit production area, such as we were in the early 1900s, but I still enjoy seeing orchard operations such as Vansandts at Springdale, and Renalie Farms at Tontitown, as well as some notable food-producing farms such as McGarrah Farms of Pea Ridge.
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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 08/16/2017