New outside exhibit donated to Historical Museum
Ed and Doris Bolain of Bella Vista recently donated to the Bella Vista Historical Museum a piece of their old farm equipment, a manure spreader, which stands on the museum grounds. Ed Bolain bought the spreader about 40 years ago for $35 from farmer Grover Bagby on Price Coffee Road near Bentonville and used it on the Bolain farm on Dartmoor Road for about 20 years. It was originally a horse-drawn spreader, but Bagby put a short tongue on the front of it to convert it to tractor use. Bolain cleaned out his horse stalls and loaded the manure on the spreader to use on his fields.
Prior to having these spreaders, the farmers had to manually shovel the manure from wagons onto their fields, so the spreaders were a big labor-saving device for them.
The Bolain family goes back many years in the history of the Bella Vista farming community. The area now known as Blowing Springs Park, renamed by John Cooper after he bought the property, used to be called Bolain Springs because Ed Bolain’s great-grandparents, Zack and Ann Bolain, moved there in the late 1920s and remained there until Zack Bolain’s death in 1944.
Ed Bolain told Bella Vista Museum volunteer Xyta Lucas that when he was a teenager, he helped his dad clean the two big chicken houses that were located on Ford Springs Road property now owned by the Bentonville School District. Using the spreader that his dad had at the time, he would fill it and then pull it by tractor from
Ford Springs Road to McNelly Road to Spanker Road (all unpaved gravel roads in those days) to their farm on Dartmoor. He said chicken litter totally changed Arkansas farmland because it was so much more fertile, meaning they could run many more cattle on it than before.
The Bella Vista Historical Museum would like to thank the Bella Vista POA Golf Maintenance Department for moving the Bolain spreader to the museum grounds. It was a flawless effort on their part.