Pea Ridge National Military Park

Memorial Day commemorates America's young, but undaunted history of armed involvement on the international scene. We most commonly recall trench scenes in Europe and island clashes in the Pacific, but some of the most brutish fighting seen by Americans happened right here in the Ozarks along the Old Wire Road.



The Battle of Pea Ridge was a crucial step the American Civil War, and a milestone event in local history. During the war, control of the Ozarks between Springfield and the Arkansas border became essential to securing the pivotal state of Missouri and key to commanding the destiny of the Western United States. The North and the South each had designs on ultimately ruling Missouri, the only state above the Mason-Dixon Line the that allowed slavery. Their armies forced the issue during the icy Winter of 1862.

[Battle of Pea Ridge at Wikipedia]


The Pea Ridge visitor's center was recently expanded with new videos and displays. The tour road makes a stop at the hill overlooking the main battlefield.

Tens of thousands of soldiers met at what is now Pea Ridge National Military Park in far Northwest Arkansas, a few miles South of the Missouri border. The area's mixture of brushy woods, spiked ridges, and open pasture are maintained in the same state as found in the middle of the 19th century, and visitors can explore the park by car, foot, bike, or even horseback. As mentioned before, one of earliest and best-preserved segments of the Butterfield Overland Route - the original Ozarkbahn - lies within park boundaries.


Hiking trails criss-cross the park. Little Mountain, which hid Confederate troop movements, can be seen in the distance from the Elkhorn Ridge overlook.

[Pea Ridge National Military Park at U.S. National Park Service]

While the setting is serene, the action in March 1862 was hard-fought and grim. United States General Samuel Curtis had chased Confederate forces back into Arkansas until supply lines ran thin. Expecting an imminent counterattack up the Old Wire Road, an outnumbered Union Army dug into the high ground along Sugar Creek, just South of Pea Ridge. Southern General Earl Van Dorn sensed an opportunity to cut Curtis off entirely, and used the cover of darkness and nearby hills to secret his forces around to the Union's rear flank.


The Union fortifications along the Old Wire Road at Little Sugar Creek never saw battle, but the soldiers entrenched there had to perform a hasty about-face to meet the Confederate forces.

The result was a series of fierce, confused melees in close quarters and frigid conditions. The Rebels emerged from the woods to capture Elkhorn Tavern, an advantageous point along the Old Wire Road, but failed to capitalize on their position. They were ultimately repulsed the following day in one of the Civil War's largest confrontations West of the Mississippi.



[Battle of Pea Ridge at the Encyclopedia of Arkansas]

The Union Army had pushed the Confederates out of Missouri for good, but the Battle of Pea Ridge was costly. There were over 3,000 casualties combined, and the developing economy of Northwest Arkansas was savaged. The Confederacy burned any infrastructure of civilization deemed beneficial to the enemy, including War Eagle Mill, most of Fayetteville, and the Van Winkle sawmill operation that formed the basis for Hobbs State Conservation Area. A significant depopulation followed, and the lay of contemporary Northwest Arkansas would have to rise from that ruin.


Elkhorn Tavern and the now-defunct hamlet of Leetown were used to treat the masses of injuries.

Pea Ridge National Military Park is fateful ground. What if the risky Confederate assault at Pea Ridge had been successful? What if the Union's campaign against the South had followed a different path through the Ozarks? Would have the businesses and fortunes of today's biggest economic drivers locally - WalMart, Tyson, J.B. Hunt, the University of Arkansas, and so on - taken root without the heavy hand of war?


Years after the battle, veterans from both sides gathered at Elkhorn Tavern. Pea Ridge would not gain National Park status until the Eisenhower era.

No matter what, war extracts a grizzly toll, especially when it destroys from within. The well-tended beauty of Pea Ridge is a striking memorial to soldiers who took part in a chapter of conflict where every victory was an exercise in American self-defeat, but bravery was on high form.

Fayetteville Parks and Recreation

Over the centuries, the Old Wire Road through the Ozarks has become a mosaic of quiet dirt roads, city streets, and modern highways that can still be walked or driven. However, one section now sleeps with the fishes. Lake Fayetteville hides the original road at a point just South of the last town featured, Springdale, Arkansas. The lake was flooded in 1949 as a municipal water supply, only to be dwarfed less than twenty years later by the creation of the much more voluminous Beaver Lake for nearby water needs. For decades, Lake Fayetteville was like Rogers' Lake Atalanta in that there was little traffic beyond biology class field trips and fishing. Luckily, a recent surge of attention is changing that.



[City of Fayetteville: Lake Fayetteville Park]

We have already read how Heritage Trail Partners, Inc., is looking to make the historic Old Wire Road a local attraction by establishing it as the main artery for a regional network of walking and cycling trails. No one in the area has embraced the concept more thoroughly than Fayetteville, which already has a broad paved highway grid for people-powered travel. One of the most popular portions of the trail network is the freshly minted five-mile loop around Lake Fayetteville, currently open and nearing full pavement completion as of this writing. The city even recognizes the historical value of the Butterfield Overland Route that made the most notorious use of the Old Wire Road.

[Fayetteville Flyer: Butterfield Trail Wayside Plaza dedicated]



The trail harbors its share of bucolic wooded scenes, but it also features a rather neat human-made view where it crosses the lake's spillway. Given the bridge's isolation from any roadside viewing, the gesture to style over a simpler lowest-bidder solution is uncommon and appreciated.



The most impressive sight on the Lake Fayetteville trail is the Botanical Garden of the Ozarks, occupying city lands on the lake's Eastern shore. The Garden is a non-profit, volunteer-driven showcase of floral creativity that officially opened for public enjoyment in 2006, and continues to plot expansion. It has a novel division of greenery into themed areas with artful installations, including a Japanese Garden, Children's Garden, and Ozark Native plants installation. Concerts, farmers' markets, and trail access points bolster the attraction.



* The local recreational opportunities are excellent, but this entry comes stamped with an asterisk. Every post to date has been a call to drive, see, and enjoy the fruits of motoring. An unfortunate reality is that Fayetteville, seat of the University of Arkansas and my home town, does not lend itself to an especially convincing study of the romantic roadside Americana. Some parts of Fayetteville are an Ozarkbahn antithesis, spurning cars and the freewheeling spirit of travel with a labyrinth of often steep, narrow streets choked with speed tables and restrictive parking ordinances. The terrain-driven street discontinuity and college-town eco-idealism express a minor, but surly intolerance for the automobile, the essential tool for Ozark pathfinders. Quite a few locals would recommend you abandon internal combustion and strictly operate by bicycle.



Why should this bother us? America's love of road-going mobility and roadside attractions, once strong at mid-20th-century, has dwindled into begrudgingly accepting cars as a means to an end. Now that cars are widely regarded as burdensome pollutant-coughing appliances, rather than lusty accessories to life's journey, the joy of travel and everything along the way is dying, as well.



Still, Fayetteville has a laudable insistence for ever-expanding public recreation, such as park space, art walks, and concerts. In grasping for communal sensibilities, the town seems more inclined to grow deliberately in order to minimize creeping suburban anonymity. Fayetteville is not a flavor that always suits the pallet of driving enthusiasts, but it is a unique one. Possession of personality in itself warrants an Ozarkbahn honorable mention, for it motivates us as roving enthusiasts to seek new and different experiences. Lake Fayetteville, for example. If you happen to enjoy greenways as much as byways, Fayetteville does it the best in the Ozarks.

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.