Springdale landmark at home in Fayetteville yard
Statue once at home in Pea Ridge
SPRINGDALE — A photograph in a museum archive revived the story of the city’s legendary street-crossed lovers.
For many years, statues of Diana, goddess of the hunt, and Popeye, the sailor man, seemingly gazed at each other across North Thompson Street. Diana graced a motor court motel on the west side while Popeye flexed his muscles with a can of spinach in front of Steele Canning Co. to the east.
Marie Demeroukas, photo archivist at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History, ran across the print in a collection of donated photographs of The Springdale News, a predecessor to the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
The late Charles Bickford took the photograph. Demeroukas found herself drawn to the photograph because the Diana statue now stands as the centerpiece in the backyard of her friends Joyce and Jay Hale in Fayetteville.
Legend begins
The Diana Motor Court provided income for a young couple after World War II.
Bertha and Toy Neal returned to Springdale in 1944, after Toy’s service with the 1st Marine Division, including the invasion of Okinawa, Japan, Micah Neal said as he shared the story of his great-grandparents.
The young couple borrowed $5,000 from Charlie George, founder of George’s Inc. and Bertha Neal’s uncle.
“They were going to grow chickens for George’s, but my great-grandmother was allergic to chicken feathers,” Neal said. “So they built the restaurant and motel.”
Memories of the motor court are few.
“It was pretty well gone by the time I got to it,” said Don Neal, grandson of the couple and Micah’s father.
Micah Neal noted it consisted of one-room cabins or lodges, which grew in popularity as America fell in love with Route 66 and the road trip.
Bertha and Toy Neal owned all the land from Christian to Backus avenues, out of the Springdale city limit and along U.S. 71.
The Neals sold the land that held the motel to Sam Mathias, one of Springdale’s prominent real estate developers.
“He built his first commercial interest, Mathias Boots,” Micah Neal said and Mathias confirmed.
“Mathias Boots Store first opened at that location in the 1970s,” Mathias said. “My parents, H.L. and Julia Mathias, had been selling boots for many years before then, so, in a way, the store was carrying on a family tradition.”
He and his family operated successful boot stores in other cities around the region. Mathias continues as a developer and owner of many commercial properties in Northwest Arkansas.
“The Diana statue, while a point of interest for the motor court, really didn’t belong in a retail parking lot, so we removed it and stored it for safety,” Mathias said. “That’s all I recall about the statue.”
Joyce Hale remembers the end of Diana’s reign at the motor court differently.
Working for the family’s engineering business in Pea Ridge, Hale drove past the statue nearly every day on her way to make shipments at Jones Truck Lines.
“I thought she was such a beauty,” Hale recalled.
She saw construction at the site and worried the statue would be knocked off her very high pedestal. She talked to a workman, who
put her in touch with a woman out of state who owned the statue.
“And she was willing to sell her locally rather than to a museum in Oklahoma City,” Hale said.
The statue next graced the Hale business in Pea Ridge.
Legend revealed
But a girl has her secrets. Joyce Hale said she thought the statue was concrete until she got a closer look when the couple purchased Diana in 1976. She was made of Carrera marble.
And she bore a signature and a date: Randolph Rogers, 1860.
“We were shocked because we never buy art,” Joyce Hale said. “We thought maybe she was worth something.”
They set out researching their piece. The only identification other than the signature was a sign on the statue at the motor lodge, which identified the statue as Diana.
“What you have is not Diana by Rogers, but Nydia, Randolph Rogers’ most famous composition,” wrote Lewis Shepherd in a 1976 letter to the Hales. Shepherd is an art appraiser in Boston. “You have a real treasure that is worth five times what you paid for it.”
Shepherd notes in another letter the Hales paid $3,000 for the piece.
“That has not diminished our love for her,” Hale said. “We are really attached to her outside of her value. We consider her a member of the family.”
Nydia, the blind flower girl, was brought to life in the 1834 book, The Last Days of Pompeii, by Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, the first Baron Lytton.
In the 1830s, excavation of the city buried under the volcanic ash of Mount Vesuvius was underway and caught the interest of society, Joyce Hale said. The work inspired Karl Briullov’s painting, The Last Day of Pompeii, which BulwerLytton saw in Milan. The story then inspired Rogers’ sculpture.
Rogers grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich., but showed little interest in art, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s website. The museum curates several of his works, including a twin of the Hales’ Nydia.
Rogers made some busts for a store in New York where he worked as a clerk. Impressed coworkers financed a trip to Florence for Rogers, where he won acclaim for his figure of Nydia. Five years later, he created the Columbus doors for the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, depicting Christopher Columbus’ life.
“Nydia was the blind servant in a wealthy household,” Hale said of the mythological story of the statue. “But she had an unrequited, silent love for a member of the household.”
A volcanic eruption darkened the skies of the Roman city with ash, but that wasn’t a hindrance to the girl, who knew how to travel the streets by feel, Hale said. Nydia was leading her secret love, Glaucus, and his own love to the safety of boats in the city’s harbor.
Nydia’s statue shows her left hand cupped to her right ear. Hale said the young couple got separated from Nydia, so she was listening to find them in the confusion of the city. She found them and led them through back streets, away from falling buildings, as they continued their flight.
“But rather than risk seeing Glaucus in heaven with his love, she commits the sin of suicide to avoid the encounter,” Hale said. “It’s such a Victorian drama. She’s pining for her love.”
Nydia came to the Hales missing a finger, her staff and part of her upper lip, which looked like it had been shot with a BB gun. These flaws were fixed in a restoration the Hales commissioned.
Today, she stands 5 feet tall on a pedestal under a steel gazebo made by Jay Hale and his engineers. A limb once fell and damaged the gazebo, but Nydia was safe, Joyce Hale said.
Pining away
Nydia keeps one secret. How did she get to Springdale?
Joyce Hale speculated a local gallery owner, Dallas Barrack, purchased the piece from an estate in the Northeast.
Barrack operated an antiques store in the building sitting today on the west bank of Spring Creek holding Phat Tire Bike Shop, said Rosa Lea Davis, a longtime Springdale resident.
A 2011 letter from a local historian, the late Bruce Vaughan, to Demeroukas at the museum, explained Barrack had a “picker” in Chicago and owned a tractor-trailer which made a round trip with items from Chicago to Springdale each week.
Recent reports say Barrack provided the statue of Apollo that originally greeted movie-goers at the Apollo Theater on Emma Avenue. Springdale businessmen Tom Lundstrom Jr. and Brian Moore recently restored and opened the theater as an event space in 2017. The Apollo statue also was restored.
The families of the gilded age would sell off their estates piece by piece — furniture, rugs, statues — when they came on hard times, Hale said.
“Nydia may have come from a chic estate. We don’t know these details.”
Popeye remains a man of mystery.
Joe Brooks — Joe Steele’s grandson, who founded Steele Canning Co. — said the statue transferred along with the Popeye brand to Pete Allen of Siloam Springs. Allen bought the brand in the 1970s and ran it as part of his Sager Creek Foods. After several sales and acquisitions, McCall Farms sells spinach under the Popeye brand.
Allen didn’t return phone calls last week.
“They were boyfriend and girlfriend,” confirmed Micah Neal of Springdale’s two landmarks.
Don Neal couldn’t confirm that relationship, “but Popeye sure was getting his eyes full,” he said.