Stopover: Springdale, AR

The Old Wire Project was bound to go South at some point. After touring the history and sights of Benton County in far Northwest Arkansas, let's cross the border into Washington County below and visit the working Ozarkbahner's town, Springdale. A backbone of local industry, the town has sometimes been painted as less than cosmopolitan. Any negative assessments are unfair, as we'll find any blue-collar connotations have only added to the uniqueness and color of the Ozarks.

[Google Maps: Springdale, AR]


Downtown Springdale

Sure, we have to get an easy one out of the way: a few parts of town smell. Springdale is home to Tyson Foods, the largest meat producer in America. Sometimes the scores of processing plants and grain silos in town share their aroma with their local neighborhoods, a fact we shared frequently at my high school one town over. You might call it an odor, but I call it character. Monumental character.


Pictures of Springdales's giant poultry and many more are available from the Debra Jane's Roadside Architecture web site (left) and Jim's Big Things page (right)

A six-foot chicken and turkey guard the entrance to 4-State Poultry Supply on Robinson Avenue, and the Allen Canning Company on Thompson has a Popeye statue that is a regular fascination of drunken pranksters. Toot, toot. Also, the previously mentioned Funland putt-putt T-Rex watches over Highway 412 just East of town. Two thousand years from now, archaeologists will be making some awkward assumptions about Springdale.

[Google Street View of 4-State Poultry Supply]


Antique egg incubator, Hispanic flavor, pious roots

We can't joke too much, though. The Old Wire Road corridor has been been paved with gold for a few titans of business. Chicken farmer John Tyson sired a Depression-era hatchery into huge wealth, and neighbors Sam Walton of Wal*Mart fame and trucking moguls Harvey Jones and J.B. Hunt laughed all the way to the bank along with him. Their thriving international business has earned Springdale one of the most prolific expressions of cultural diversity in mid-America. How about the largest concentration of Marshallese outside the Marshall Islands? Latin America is best represented, creating a Pan-American dynamic that blends Bible Belt sensibility with a young and entrepreneurial Hispanic culture.



One of my favorite local ventures is the Pontiac Coffee House on Thompson Street. It occupies the former Charlesworth Pontiac (later, Steve Smith GMC-Jeep) building, a model post-war mid-century dealership from an architectural standpoint. The Pontiac offers coffee, smoothies, baked goods, gifts, and even a church inside. For enterprising Ozarkbahners, the real prize is their preservation of automobilia, like the 1954 Pontiac convertible in the former showroom.



For many years, Charlesworth was also a American Motor Company franchise, pedaling wonderfully oddball big-three alternatives like the Rambler, Pacer, and Matador. Their display case contains cool articles from the era of Internationals, Renaults, Eagles, and so many forgotten and unloved AMC marques from America's motoring past. I mean, they have an original toy AMC Gremlin on display. Hallowed ground.



The Pontiac isn't Springdale's only exhibition of throwback horsepower. The Arkansas and Missouri Railroad is headquartered downtown, and runs a fleet of locomotives from ALCO, a manufacturer that did not survive the 1960s. Among railroading buffs, their operation would be akin to a taxi company or delivery service doing business with a pool of AMC Ramblers. The A&M headquarters is a rolling museum where ALCO diesel-electric units from all over North America are scavenged for parts and restored for service, making it a curiosity for all manner of gearheads.


Downtown signage

For the guardians of a wider-ranging history, Shiloh Museum of Ozark History is right down the street from the A&M Railroad. The museum resides next to an old alignment of the Old Wire Road that runs parallel to the of the town's modern namesake, Spring Creek. The town was originally named Shiloh, a popular Biblical place name appropriate for the Baptist farmers who settled the area near the spring-fed stream.


Outdoors on the Shiloh Museum grounds

Townsfolk adopted the name of Springdale in 1872 because the US Post Office reported another town in Arkansas had already snaked "Shiloh." Wow, what name-snaking jerks. That is just one of the many episodes of local and regional history found at Shiloh Museum. Period dwellings and farming showcased on museum grounds nicely complement the wealth of information inside.




A sampling of Shiloh Museum exhibits

Why do we like Springdale? It's Anytown, Ozarks, USA. For almost 200 years, the Old Wire Road has brought a class of hard-working people to the town in search of opportunity. They built a history of self-starters, and there's a visible sense of pride in rooted in this industriousness. Take a closer look at Springdale, because there may be more to the story than you think.

Driven: the Old Wire Road

Until now, my model Ozarkbahn drive has been a blacktop whip-crack with tires and brakes wincing in protest. This second installment of the Old Wire Road Project takes a new direction. We're abandoning the roads less traveled, and turning down the most beaten path in the Ozarks.



The essential companion to this trip is the Driver's Guide to the Butterfield Overland Mail Route, Volume One: Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma by Kirby Sanders. It's a turn-by-turn, full-color vault of Old Wire information, charting the first half of John Butterfield's goliath stagecoach route. Check any Ozark historical society or museum to get your copy. I can vouch for it's value because I failed to discover it until after weeks of hazard and error. Stopping for directions defies the spirit of freewheeling discovery, but I'll recommend the book as a matter of local interest and historical completeness. It also contains directions, if you're the kind to admit using them.


Old Wire Road at the Missouri-Arkansas border

Of course, the 2,800-mile Butterfield Trail can't be covered in one sitting. Even the Old Wire Road's full Ozark trek is too wealthy in sights for one undertaking. Let's start at the Missouri border, and follow the road's most unique stretch through the most Northwest corner of Arkansas, Benton County. Heading South, it begins as Missouri 37 tracks the general bend of the original Old Wire Road from Springfield into the Ozark hills. A spur splits from Highway 37 and marks a telling divide at the Arkansas border. Can you tell which side won the Civil War? No consulting your Driver's Guide.


Pott's Hill battle marker and other sights along the Old Wire Road

Here the pavement ends and the old Confederacy begins. In February 1862, fast-marching Union forces chased Rebels raiders Benny Hill style towards Arkansas, finally catching them near Pott's Hill on the Arkansas border. A historical marker notes this valley along Old Wire Road was the Civil War's first engagement on Arkansas soil. The brief clash ended with each side drawing back to their respective sides of the border to regroup for the upcoming Battle of Pea Ridge. No sexy parties ensued.

[Skirmish at Pott's Hill at the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture]

With the days of armed battled long expired, travel along this valley on an August evening makes a solid case for endless Summer. Slow ride, take it easy. A canopy of trees shadows the road, carrying us through rustic scenes that have changed little in 150 years.


Lazy Summer scenes

These few miles of graded dirt roads lead to the edge of Pea Ridge National Military Park, where a fence bars entry into a well-preserved mile of stagecoach-era Old Wire leading to Elkhorn Tavern (as previously introduced). From the tavern, a park tour road echoes the old trail out of the park and onto gravel roads towards Little Sugar Creek.


Little Sugar Creek park and bridge over the creek into Brightwater

In March 1862, the Union Army dug into bluffs along Little Sugar Creek hoping to repel a 16,000-soldier Confederate force marching up the Telegraph Road. In the cover of darkness, the crafty rebels opted to take the scenic route around this position and begin the Battle of Pea Ridge about a mile to the North. A pleasant little park at this site marks the Thing That Never Actually Got Around to Happening. However, drama did not elude the hamlet of Brightwater that sat on the opposite side of the creek. In 1947, a tornado completely erased the town from the map, killing four.

[Brightwater, AR, on Google Maps]


Avoca railroad bridge, town offices, and stone marker

When the Frisco Railroad laid tracks along Little Sugar Creek in the 1880s, the residents of Brightwater relocated their town site to a hill just to the South in order to receive a rail station. A concrete railroad arch over the still-unpaved road serves as a portal between the original site and its successor, now known as Avoca. Today the town of Avoca embraces its history with liberal dose of stagecoach imagery and an Arkansas-shaped stone marker listing history's designations of the Old Wire Road.


Old Rogers and the former Summit Motel, once the location of Callahan Station

Leaving Avoca, the road unceremoniously parallels the railroad tracks into an aged, workaday section of Rogers. A few blocks from a metal scrap yard, Old Wire meets the site of the Butterfield line's first official stage stop in Arkansas, Callahan Station. In his Driver's Guide, Kirby Sanders identifies the current building as the 1889-vintage Summit Hotel, an antique in its own right. By default, we can figure the original coach station burned down in the Civil War. Sharp-eyed readers have probably noticed everything in the Ozarks got burned down in the Civil War.


Old Rogers continues along Old Wire Road

From Callahan's Station, our byway passes the rather well-kept Rogers downtown, then snakes Southward through the hills above Lake Atalanta and the working-class neighborhoods that lead out of town. The pavement ends past the city limits, and the road once again dips into into the tangy glaze of history in a valley known as Cross Hollow.

[Cross Hollow on Google Maps]

To defend its hold on Arkansas, the Confederate Army established Camp Benjamin in Cross Hollow near current-day Monte Ne. The army maintained a sentry point on the high ground overlooking the Old Wire Road just to the East of the camp, an important outpost against Union traffic from the North.


Old Wire Road enters Cross Hollow

The camp barracks were erected under contract from sawmill entrepreneur Peter Van Winkle, who held the land that would become Hobbs State Park. No visible trace of Camp Benjamin remains, as it was burned down by the Union Army pressing the Confederates back towards the South.

[Article: Confederate Encampment at Cross Hollow from Arkansas Historical Quarterly]

Cross Hollow does have one slightly newer relic, a decaying rock post office built during a brief period prosperity in the valley. Around the turn of the century, a railroad spur was built to Coin Harvey's now-sunken Monte Ne resort, later serving the Rogers White Lime Works, a defunct kilning operation. Lime, baby!


Derelict Cross Hollow post office, and a scenic pond in the hollow

South of Cross Hollow, the Old Wire Road straightens and returns to pavement East of Lowell, and cruises past Bethel Heights on its way to Fitzgerald's Station just past the boundary of Benton County. This drive is short in miles, but long in history.


Heritage Trail markers

Drive it yourself, and you may notice signs marking a "Heritage Trail." This is the work of the Heritage Trail Partners, Inc., a group seeking promote Northwest Arkansas history and points of interest through recreational travel along the road. The group's ultimate aim is to add bike and pedestrian trails the length of the contemporary alignment in Western Arkansas, making the road an attraction in itself.

While not a driver's delight, Old Wire Road exhibits such a varied past that you may find yourself sharing in the enthusiasm.

Traffic: everything from no cars allowed (Pea Ridge walking section) to active Ozark artery
Driving challenge: leave the sports car at home
Purty mouth: let's just say some sections still don't get a lot of visitors
Ozarkbahn rating: histor-a-tacular