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.