In Pea Ridge, there was a Doctor J.C. Prop that came to Pea Ridge about 1931 and started a practice out of his house. He later built a hospital near his home and had a good practice going. In 1935, Dr. Prop was convicted in a robbery of the Pea Ridge Bank. The story of this was written by Billie Jines in her Back Roads article that ran as a special in the Northwest Arkansas News on Sunday, Dec. 30, 1990.
All in all, the year of 1931 was a pretty good year for the large Pitts family. We had fared pretty well and had stored up enough to get us through most of the winter. Although the house was small, we liked living on the 60-acre farm. Mother's heifers would soon be 3 years old and would start springing calves and she needed more room for them to pasture.
Dad had got a two-year lease on the old Hammond's nursery place and we were looking forward to moving to it. It had a fairly large two-story house that was in good shape and a good, deep well that had good, cold water. The main problem was it had a log barn and it was old and airy. It had about 550 acres of land with most of it on top of the Elkhorn Mountain. It was on the highway between Pea Ridge and Garfield and about a half mile west of the Elkhorn Tavern. It had been repossessed by the bank because someone couldn't pay off the $14,000 loan.
It had 60 acres south of the highway that lay in a very unusual shape. It was a triangle. It started at a point on top of the mountain that ran southwest at a 45 degree angle to a point, then about three quarters of a mile, then ran straight north to the highway, then due east to a point where the highway curved around the mountain, then up to the mountain to the starting point.
The land north of the highway started at a point on top of the mountain then went straight north for a mile then west for a mile then south for three quarters of a mile then east for a half mile then south for a quarter mile then west a quarter mile then south to the highway.
We were now in the Central School District and Jewell Sims was our teacher. We had to walk over a mile to school. Walking to school on the same route were Ruth Patton, daughter of Dema Patton and the late Frank Patton who had been a teacher at Central, four of the Pitts boys, Bob, Joe, David and Hugh, Izella Williams (the Rev. B.R. and Mrs. William's daughter), Coin and Frank Patton, sons of Tom and Mrs. Patton. Then, after we were about a mile, we picked Juanita Ruddick. Ruth was the oldest, although she claims that she is younger than I, I get even with her, I tell everyone that she was my teacher, Ruth was in the eighth grade, Bob was next and he was in the seventh grade, but because they taught the seventh grade every other year he was now taking the eighth grade.
Joe was in the fifth, David was in the third and Hugh was in the first and I don't know about the others. We had to cross a foot bridge about half to school and it was treacherous during the bad weather. For some reason they would always make me go first to test whether we could make it or not.
Soon after I had started to Central, I had to show my fighting ability. It seemed that when you entered a new school someone would always challenge you and with Bob being bigger than all of the other boys I was the one challenged. I seen it coming and I was ready for it.
It happened on a Wednesday night at a prayer meeting. The boy called me out and told me that he was going to whip me. I got him down on the platform of the well and was giving it to him pretty good going over, when his older brother and Felix, my older brother, separated and made us shake hands. The only way he hurt me was that he was a scratcher more so than a fighter and he scratched the hide off the back of my hands. After that little tussle we Pitts boys fit into the crowd and the boy and I have been friends ever since.
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Editor's note: Joe Pitts (1920-2008) was a native of Pea Ridge and regular columnist for the newspaper. He began writing a column for The Times in 2000 initially entitled "Things Happen" by Joe "Pea Patch" Pitts.