How quickly houses go up!
I am amazed at how quickly things change in our town of Pea Ridge!
This week I have been observing a new house being constructed in the 1100 block of North Davis Street. It seems about a week ago that the lot was an empty, untouched lot, lying there as it had done for years, with nothing happening. Now, after just a few days have passed, the foundation has been dug, concrete has been poured for foundation land floors, the walls have been framed up, and roof trusses are mostly in place, almost ready for the roof decking and roof cover. I’m thinking that in the next week the new house will be “in the dry,” as we say.
Of course this house that I have my eye on is not an exception. All over, we see new houses under construction, in the new sub-division off Arkansas Highway 265 (Hayden Road) near the Junior High
School, and across the highway where we have always been accustomed to seeing farmland and which is now undergoing preparations for a new subdivision, not to speak of the area out Ross Salvage Road and Blue Jay Road, plus the old B.J. White property off It’ll Do Road — it’s new houses everywhere you look.
Just as amazing is the transformation of my own father’s former property which lies on the east side of the Summit Meadows addition. The property was recently sold to a development company that wasted no time in taking out every existing thing on the property, and beginning the process of laying out streets, drain lines, water and sewer systems, and everything. I am kind of comparing the quick progress that the builders make to my own project of renovating our old farmhouse north of town. I have been working on the old house for nearly a year, and I still have a long way to go before calling my project anything like finished.
I do comfort myself a little, in thinking that renovation projects are quite different from building new. With renovation projects, you make a plan, go in and take out a few things, discover that you are dealing with more problems than expected, update you plans, go to work again, decide that you see still more that needs to be done while you are at it, so you update your plans once more, spend more money, make many more trips to the store and lumber yard, and on and on. My experience with renovation projects indicates that it will take about three times as much time and money as would be spent on building a new house. But I come from a time when one wouldn’t think of tearing down a perfectly good older structure if it could be reasonably redone! Besides, places have a way of developing sentimental value, as well as financial value. To me, that’s not a small thing!
When my wife and I moved back to Pea Ridge in 2002, we still considered the Givens addition to be a new addition. “way out of town” but “in-town” in a new way of thinking. Shady Grove was still way out of town. Even Blackjack Corner was still out of town, except that baseball fields were indicating that Pea Ridge is moving outward.
Now we have the new high school situated at that corner. One of the remarks
I have come to enjoy making about our town comes from an invitation I had sometime back to make a talk on the history of Pea Ridge for the Genealogy Society at the Bentonville City Library. After my talk, one man asked me, “Is Pea Ridge about like it always was? Or is it different?”
My response was, “Well, Pea Ridge is now about twice the size that Bentonville was when Sam Walton moved here in 1950!” In the late 1940s, Bentonville had a population of about 2,500, Rogers was approaching 5,000, and Pea Ridge probably had only about 200. I’m expecting the new census to show Pea Ridge with a population of around 6,000 in 2020, with no signs of slowing growth.
Work is going on now to expand our water and sewer infrastructure. And, as recent cold weather experience shows, we evidently need a new expansion of our natural gas capacity.
Our farm on Hayden Road used to be about 2 miles north of town. Now, the regular city limits are on our south property line, and a whole gallery of new houses sit just over the fence from our pasture land. Pea Ridge has already expanded south to Little Sugar Creek. Who knows but that we may expand all the way to Big Sugar Creek and the Missouri state line before many years have passed!
I never cease to be amazed at how much change can take place in one lifetime!
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge and an award-winning columnist, is vice president of Pea Ridge Historical Society. Opinions expressed are those of the writer. He can be contacted by email at joe369@century tel.net, or call 621-1621.