Building houses — how things have changed

We’re building lots of houses in Pea Ridge these days. That seems amazing to a fellow like me who can easily remember when there were no more than 200 people living within the city limits of our town.

At the time I first remember our town, the north city limit (if you exclude the small ribbon that reaches out to Missouri) was at what we now call Pike Street and the south city limit was at the street we now call Patton Street.

Pea Ridge was a very small town back then. Today’s Pea Ridge High School would have been well out of town west, and today’s Post Office would have been well out of town south.

Today, the last remaining empty spaces of the Luther Martin farm (across from the High School extending north) are being filled in with new houses, the space between the Solly Ricketts’ house (on the corner across from City Park) and the Beard house (top of the next hill north) are being filled in, and the sub-division just south of our farm (across our south fence on what once was Coach Steve Coutchie’s cattle farm) is being filled in. The Herb Givens Farm is a Pea Ridge Subdivision, as is the Victor Miller farm (the Windmill Subdivision where we live).

Houses these days are built for people who drive cars.

That was not the case in earlier years. I recall the house where my grandparents lived in the early 1940s. The little building for parking the car was a separate building from the house. Also our old house on the next place south of theirs, had no garage for the car at first. We built our first garage in 1948, after we had bought our new Fleetline Chevrolet car.

Our garage was away from the house by 25 feet or so. Apparently when people first started getting cars they thought the car needed to be kept away from the house, because there was danger of fire with all the gasoline and oil, and besides, gasoline and oil were smelly and grubby and drippy and nobody wanted that in their house.

Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house was a large oldfashioned two-story house, with numerous bedrooms upstairs, and large front porches all across the front. There was a ground story front porch and a screenedin upper story porch. In the summertime, it was common for the family (or at least some of the family) to sleep out on the upper porch. It was cooler that way, since in those days there were no air conditioners or electric fans, no electricity in the house at all.

At one time the house had a kitchen separated from the other part of the house. People used to build kitchens away from the main part of the house, so if there was a fire in the kitchen they would have a better chance of saving the rest of the house. It was also cooler in the house when you didn’t have the cook stove with a fire in it. Houses in the earlier days were often built with ceilings 10 or even 12 feet high, partly because that helped the house circulate air all through, and that made the house cooler in summertime.

In the mid-1950s what we called the ranch-style houses began to be popular. The ranch-style houses were pretty economical to build, being basically rectangular in shape, 60 to 80 feet long, 32 to 40 feet wide.

One of the popular ornaments for these houses was the “picture window” in the living room. The “picture window” was a large window made of one large plate of glass, rather than the usual window of multiple panes.

Porches in general were shrinking. Often a ranchstyle house would have only a small entry porch. Porches for sitting out in the open air were disappearing. The roofs of ranch-style houses would usually be flatter than those of earlier styles, and might be straight rectangular slopes or maybe two levels. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, people were including a garage space as part of the house. The house we lived in on Patton Street had been built in the early 1960s by Bryant and Hattie Miller. As was customary then, it had a single car garage, a rather flat two-level roof, a small front entry porch and no back porch.

Apparently Hattie had wanted a sun room, so they had added the sun room to the back of the house, rather than having a screenedin back porch. Houses today seem considerably more elaborate than the houses that were built in the 1960s and thereabout. The two-car garage, prominently and conveniently place in front of the house, has become standard fare.

Larger, more expensive houses may have garage space for three or even four vehicles, since families commonly have multiple vehicles. There will be room for Mom’s SUV, Dad’s pickup, Junior’s Spark, and maybe even space for the boat and the four-wheeler.

Often roofs will be quite tall, to accommodate cathedral ceilings in places, and the roofs are often in several sections and several levels, involving some complicated construction angles.

Of course, today electricity is almost an absolute necessity. House ventilation systems don’t work without electricity, air conditioners don’t work without electricity, and even gas appliances often depend on electricity for ignition and for regulation. Sometimes I wonder where we would be today if the nation in the 1930s and 1940s had not gone all in for providing electrical power everywhere, in the rural areas as well as in the towns and cities.

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, and a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. The opinions expressed are those of the author. He can be contacted by e-mail at joe369@centurytel.net, or call 621-1621.