Local history vital for NWA understanding
It’s always a balancing act, weighing the needs of modernity in a growing region against the desire to prevent the loss of significant structures from decades or centuries past. Throw in property rights vs. regulation and preservation can become a bit of a hot potato.
In the ongoing love/hate relationship I’ve got with Facebook, perhaps one of the features I appreciate the most is its ability to pluck photos and events from the past and show them to me today.
It’s the same with services such as Google Photos and Apple Photos. On Friday, one of them treated me to a visit back to 2009 when my youngest son was playing soccer in Fayetteville’s Parks and Recreation program and my oldest was playing flag football with the Boys & Girls Club. They are, respectively, a senior at Fayetteville High School and a sophomore at the University of Arkansas today.
It’s like my own little history book.
When I was their age, all I was focused on was either the present or the future. As I get older, the past has as much fascination, and sometimes more, whether it’s George Washington and the American Revolution or the Fulbrights of Fayetteville or the Waltons moving to Bentonville.
Thankfully, there are great people involved in recounting and preserving history around these parts, including such institutions as the Washington County Historical Society, which by the way holds its annual meeting and distinguished citizen presentation from 3 to 5 p.m. today at Mount Sequoyah’s Bailey Center ($15 tickets).
Or the Benton County Historical Society, which at 4 p.m. next Sunday holds its annual Bean Supper at its offices at 306 N.W. Second St. in Bentonville ($10 tickets).
The Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in Springdale and the Rogers Historical Museum are preservation mainstays, but so are smaller operations in towns from Prairie Grove to Gravette, from Siloam Springs to Eureka Springs.
YouTube can be a great resource for local and state history, too, but like everything online, you’ve got to consider the source of who made the video you’re watching. Local historians, such as Fayetteville’s J.B. Hogan, make great contributions to local history videos.
Last week, Fayetteville had the first of a set of “input” sessions as the city government tries to figure out what its policies ought to be regarding historic preservation. It’s always a balancing act, weighing the needs of modernity in a growing region against the desire to prevent the loss of significant structures from decades or centuries past. Throw in property rights vs. regulation and preservation can become a bit of a hot potato.
Fayetteville also recently took a step toward recognizing important history involving people who, in decades past, haven’t necessarily been in a position to have their stories told. Minority populations have made contributions to the region’s history. Northwest Arkansas history can’t be fully told without them.
Disagreements will be part of efforts to mark historical figures and events. I personally wouldn’t have given up Archibald Yell Boulevard for a street named after formerly enslaved Nelson Hackett. In my view, it was vitally important to add Hackett’s story to Fayetteville’s recognition of history. I wouldn’t have done it by subtracting Yell’s historic connection to the city.
But the important thing is the ongoing effort to convey local history, to inform residents and
visitors alike, to give the people who love Northwest Arkansas a foundation of knowledge about everything that has been part of getting the region to where it is in 2022. That will need to include exploration of successes and failures, the rights and the wrongs, the good guys and the bad guys — with recognition that few people will fit entirely into either of those categories.
One final thought: Where can historical markers have a high chance of being read? How many roadside markers across the state are passed by hundreds of times a day? But why not put more of them on our growing trail system, which is heavily used, but in such a way people will be more willing to stop and read some local history?