Jacket holds Rich Memories

I have given, at different times, at least five different answers when someone has asked mewhere I am from.

These have included McDonald County, Washburn, Seligman, Pea Ridge and Jacket. And no, I did not spend my childhood hopping from place toplace. In fact, I lived my entire life to the age of 18 in the same house on the same farm. But that farm was in McDonald County, Mo. I went to school in Washburn, Mo.

The mailing address was Seligman, Mo., and the closest town was Pea Ridge, Ark.

And then thereis Jacket. Of course, Jacket is the most accurate answer, but if I said that to most people who lived more than 10 miles away from there, a blank stare would be the most common response. That is understandable though.

If you do not know where Jacket is, you would likely drive right through it and not even realize you had been there. But that has not always been the case. It was once a thriving little community that has been home to a post office, store, school, mill, multiple churches and a tomato canning operation.

The area that became Jacket, located just inside the Missouri state line about five miles north of Pea Ridge, was for centuries home to native tribes. But by the mid-19th Century, the native people had left and were replaced by pioneers from eastern states and otherparts of Missouri and Arkansas.

The first pioneer to set up a permanent settlement in Jacket is thought to have come around 1840 or 1841 and is remembered only by his surname, Clemons. Clemons built a water-powered corn cracker at the spot where Otter Creek, which flows north from Pea Ridge, runs into Big Sugar Creek. I have never heard or read who coined the name Big Sugar Creek, but it supposedly came from the groves of sugar maples that grew on its banks. Possibly this name came from Clemons, and perhaps the name Jacket did also, which I have been told came from the colonies of yellow jacket wasps that were populous in the area.

Clemons did not stay in the area long, selling his corn cracker to Henry Schell in 1846. It is said that Schell financed the purchase of Clemons’ operation by selling a young slave boy for $400. Henry Schell had already established one community, Shell Knob in Barry County, and he brought his wife, Elizabeth Yocum Schell, and their young children to Jacket likely because of the large tracts of land that were open for homesteading claims. He built a mill at the site of the corn cracker and had a house built west of the mill out of lumber that had been sawed at the Van Winkle mill in War Eagle. By the time of his murder by bushwhackers in 1863, he had amassed landholdings of 1,000 acres.

In the summer of 1863, the Civil War was in full swing and southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas was an area torn by loyalties between the North and the South. Henry Schell’s four oldest sons were all fighting for the Confederacy, so it is no secret on which side his loyalties were. On July 11, 1863, he was working in his mill when he either heard or saw a group of bushwhackers heading his way. He took off toward his house, but was shot as he went up the hill. His wife, daughters and some neighbor women took his body and prepared it for burial, using a meal box from the mill to serve as a coffin, and buried him in the front yard of his home. Oneof his sons, a blacksmith by trade, later put a wrought iron fence around it.

Following his death, his 1,000 acres was divided among his descendants, who built homes, started businesses and set aside land for churches, a cemetery and a school. Over time his descendants continued to subdivide their acreage and sold off plots to other families, including my own Patterson and Burnett ancestors.

For many years, until its closure around 1950, the Jacket store served as the center of the community. Like many old country stores, it was more than just a place to buy merchandise, but a place to meet and talk and, in its later years, to buy gas. Right acrossthe road from it was a small tomato canning operation, which had been owned by members of the Schell family, who also ran similar operations in Powell and Pea Ridge. From 1911 to 1930, a branch of the U.S. Postal Service was even managed out of the old Jacket store, until expanded rural postal delivery eliminated the need for it.

For most of the last century, both Antioch Church of Christ and Sugar Creek Baptist Church catered to the souls of the community, with the Church of Christ, with its distinctive flagstone exterior, still operating today, though the Baptist church closed in the 1980s. In the early years of the last century, the grounds of the oldBaptist church also served as the location for annual Fourth of July celebrations and other community events.

There was a schoolhouse, known both as the Jacket or the Pleasant View school, which taught generations of Jacket area children from the first through the eighth grade until the rural schools were consolidated into a new building on the school district’s main campus in Washburn in the late 1950s. And there was the old Jacket bridge, dilapidated when I was a boy, but when it was built around 1920 it was a local marvel, no longer did you have to ford the creek to get to Pea Ridge, you could take your buggy or Model-T across a single-lane, woodenbridge with concrete supports.

But Jacket’s heyday was not meant to last. With a bridge and more and more people having cars, people did not need to stay in Jacket to do their shopping, work, or even go to church. By 1960, the store, post office, tomato plant and school were all shuttered. And by the time I was growing up in Jacket, starting in the late 1970s, the school building had already burned down, the tomato plant had been torn down and the store had been turned into a barn. Even the Jacket bridge was on its last leg at that time, rickety with a major crack on its main eastern support.

I knew people who were afraid to drive on it and more than oncesaw cars that overshot the sharp corner on its eastern approach and ended up vertical down the embankment. By the time I graduated high school in 1995, the old Jacket bridge and all of its character and nostalgia were gone, replaced with a two-lane concrete span that’s western end sits about where Henry Shell’s mill once stood.

Today, the old store building still stands, though it is only a ghost of the structure the Cline and Eva Carden ran their general merchandise business out of. Antioch Church of Christ still holds services. And the Antioch and Dent cemeteries still serve as open places for those wanting to be laid to rest among family or in the little community they loved and calledhome in life. But most other tell-tell signs of the once active community have recessed, the old Baptist Church is a private residence and Henry Schell’s mill and home have long since disappeared, though Sara Gundel still makes sure his grave, which is in her backyard, is properly tended.

I have many warm memories about the old Baptist church, which I have previously written about, and the worn out old Jacket bridge. I remember fishing over its rails and swimming in a deep spot under its east end.

The bridge was such a part of the childhood of my brothers and myself that when my oldest brother, Wes, passed away in 1994 we even had its image engraved on his headstone.

And so while a stranger driving through Jacket might not see much, every time someone whohas lived there or spent time there goes through it, they see the history and the sense of community that have existed there and that still do, even if it is not readily visible to the eye.

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Editor’s note: Jeff Billington grew up on the family farm in the Jacket, Mo., community north of Pea Ridge He currently lives in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Rockville, Md., and works for the National Parks Conservation Association. He is the son of David Billington of Jacket and Vickie Christman of Seneca, Mo. His late great-grandparents were lifetime Jacket and Pea Ridge area residents Cecil and Pearl Patterson.

Community, Pages 7 on 12/28/2011