State Park Needs Prescribed Burn

PRAIRIE GROVE — Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park has been trying to conduct a prescribed burn on the hill below the Borden House for three years and Superintendent Jessee Cox hopes it will finally happen this year.

Weather conditions have not cooperated in past years.

This would be the first prescribed burn in history on park property, Cox said.

The purpose is to return the hillside to how it looked when the Bordens lived in that area. About five acres will be used for the prescribed burn.

“It looked like the site where the cannon is,” Cox said. “It had canopy with mature trees and some understory trees. You should be able to walk through it. It would have been a park-like setting and the Bordens were able to look through the trees and see their farm and livestock.”

The hillside below the house now is filled with wooded debris, thickets, vines and scrub- type trees. A prescribed burn would burn all the debris and clean up the area.

The process to approve a prescribed burn on park property was intensive, Cox said, adding, “I have a huge project portfolio on it. We had to have a lot of signatures sign off on it.”

The approved document is detailed and a “well thought-out”

plan, Cox said.

The Arkansas Forestry Commission will conduct the prescribed burn, according to Dennis Spear, the Commission’s county ranger for Washington County. Prairie Grove Fire Department has been asked to be on site as a precautionary measure.

Several factors must be in place for the burn to happen, Spear said. The woods must be dry enough to burn. Humidity should be in the upper 30 percent to 40 percent range and wind needs to be coming out of the southwest.

“We don’t want to impact the town or the highway,” Spear said.

The normal burning period falls from the middle of January to the middle of April so the Commission does not have a wide window for conducting a prescribed burn.

“We’re totally weather dependent,” Spear noted. “It’s a crapshoot on what we get done each year.”

A prescribed burn at the state park will burn off the smaller sprouts and brush to open up the woods in that area, Spear said.

“They (state park officials) want a pretty hot burn to restore those woods to how it looked during the battle. It will be a lot more open with large trees.”

A prescribed burn is a good management tool, Spear said, because it allows new plant growth in the area, which will benefit wildlife. It also provides a buffer zone against any wildfires.

Cox said he has a list of people he will contact if the burn is scheduled. These include neighbors of the park. The burn should only take about an hour and should be completed and everything cleaned up in three to four hours.

Spear said the National Weather Service in Tulsa has a fire prediction center with current and predicted weather. He monitors this site to determine if the Commission can plan to go ahead with prescribed burns.

“If conditions are not right, we’re not going to light a fire,” Spear said.