City street names honor battle combatants

Editor’s Note: The following is from Billie Jines’ 1996 booklet, “The Streets of Pea Ridge.” It has been updated to include new streets and those scheduled for future development.

After more than a century as a town, Pea Ridge had named its streets. And in doing so, had developed a unique system for naming the streets … to call all north-south streets after Union participants of the Battle of Pea Ridge, and all east-west ones for their Confederate counterparts.

In 1995, Ordinance No. 215 was passed by the Pea Ridge City Council. The street naming segment of the detailed ordinance made it mandatory to use the north-south for Union and east-west for Confederate names of combatants of the Battle of Pea Ridge.

Confederate names:

• Sims Lane — East off North Weston near West Pickens Road. It was named for Col. W.B. Sims, who led the 9th Texas Cavalry for the Confederacy.

• Slack Street is Arkansas Hwy. 72 West — Heads west from Curtis Avenue. It honors the third general killed at the Battle of Pea Ridge, Brig. Gen. William Y. Slack, who led the 2nd Missouri Brigade. Gen. Slack had been seriously wounded the August before the Battle of Pea Ridge when he fought at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek near Springfield. He had not completely recovered at the battle here. At Pea Ridge, a bullet struck him in the abdomen only inches from his earlier wound. Mortally wounded, he was carried to a field hospital at the tanyard and later moved to a farmhouse on Rollers Ridge near the present site of Gateway. There he died March 20, 1862, several days after the battle. He was buried in that area, but in 1880, his body was re-interred in the Confederate Cemetery at Fayetteville. His widow brought their two sons for the service. One son had only been six months old when his father had been killed, but was 18 years old when he came for the reburial at Fayetteville. There are two monuments on the Pea Ridge National Military Park, not including grave markers in Ford Cemetery. One of the two monuments bears the names of the generals killed at Pea Ridge: Mc-Culloch, McIntosh and Slack. Pea Ridge has a street that honors each of them.

• Stone Street — Turns east off of North Curtis Avenue opposite the street named Patton, goes one block passing the Church of Christ as it heads to North Davis Street. Honors J.A. Stone, Co. K, 4th Arkansas.