The ‘little white building’ at school
There have been many little white schoolhouses over the years, but the little white school building that was put together in 1948 for the Pea Ridge School was, I think, rather unique, especially in the origin of the materials that went into its construction, and in the ways people were involved in putting it together. Our little white building, as many of us called it, was built just off the northeast corner of the main downtown school building. It was the first elementary addition that was not part of the main building.
Prior to the 1947-48 school year, all grades in the Pea Ridge Public School, Grades 1 through 12, were in the 1930 red brick school building, still in its original rectangular configuration. Many of the classrooms were then accommodating two grades together. The entire school population was about 140.
These years following the end of World War II were years of growth and expansion for Pea Ridge Schools, and also a time when new houses, new business buildings about town, and new churches were being built. For example, in the Pea Ridge downtown, Eva Patterson’s store had been built (now T.H. Rogers Hardware), and across from it the new C.H. Mount’s Grocery and Feed Store had replaced the old Harve Ricketts Blacksmith Shop. The Masonic Lodge had built its new meeting place (now the Pea Ridge Historical Society Museum), and Mt. Vernon Presbyterian Church had built its new building.
For the 1947-1948 school year, the community added two wings to the main school building, the northwest wing and the northeast wing, and several feet behind the new northeast wing the little white building was also added. I was in the third grade that year, so I was not in the little white building then, but I would be going to fourth grade in 1948-49 in the little white building, with Mrs. Simpkins as teacher. The year 1947-48 was also the year that the school began purchasing school-owned school buses. Until then, the bus drivers had furnished their own vehicles.
One driver, O.R. Morrison, had a real school bus; whereas the others were trucks adapted to haul kids to school, not very fancy.
Several school consolidations had taken place in the Pea Ridge area in 1929, and more would take place in 1949. So the expansions to the capacity of Pea Ridge Schools was partly due to those consolidations.
In 1929, the Shady Grove School (Arkansas Highway 94 West), the Sassafras School (Patton Road Northeast), the Possum Trot School (between Mariano Road and Dove Road), and Cross Lanes School (Lee Town Road) had been consolidated into Pea Ridge.
In 1949, Twelve Corners School and Central School would be added to that number, and Bayless School a few years later.
The little white elementary building came about as the old Camp Crowder Army Air Corp Training Base at Neosho, Mo., was being closed. Many of its buildings were decommissioned and made available to surrounding communities who could salvage building materials from them. A group of men from Pea Ridge were sent to Neosho to dismantle barracks buildings to obtain usable lumber and other materials. I had a most interesting conversation a few days ago with Alvie Lee Johnson, who was part of that work crew who dismantled barracks at Camp Crowder and trucked the lumber and other materials to Pea Ridge to build the little white school building. Alvie remembered the work crew as including Dutch Wilkerson (whose ton-and-a-half International truck was used for the hauling), Alvie Lee Johnson, Eugene Henson, Alvin Hall, Carroll Hall and Willfred Carden.
This project reminds me of how different was the approach to taking down older buildings and constructing new ones in those earlier days. Today, taking down an older building is usually considered a demolition.
In earlier days, taking down an older building was considered a dismantling; the parts of the old building were taken down, piece by piece, with the objective of saving boards and beams that might find a use in a new building. Today, using salvaged materials is considered a negative, and the building is often considered as lacking quality since the materials are not new. In the case of the little white building, the result was a fine little building which served the Pea Ridge Schools in a variety of purposes for some 70 years.
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