NORTHWEST ARKANSAS — I would like to insert a brief history on the landmark recreation area on Beaver Lake known as Hogscald Hollow.
Hogscald Hollow is a few miles south of Eureka Springs off Arkansas Highway 23 in Carroll County.
Early settlers used the Hollow area for butchering hogs. This is how the area got its name. During the Civil War in the early 1860s, Confederate troops made whiskey in and around this same area.
The Hogscald Hollow area became popular once again when the lake was filled in the early 1960s and it gained notoriety for nude bathing. The popularity of skinny dipping came because of the remoteness of the area.
For the past 30 years, the Hogscald Hollow area has been known for swimming, boating, skinny dipping and vehement partiers.
Recent incidents in the area the last few years have includeddrownings, a fall, a stabbing and a body found floating in the water.
In closing, some people discern the Hogscald Hollow area to have some mysterious aura about it because of its association with death and other tragedies in recent years.
BILL BOATRIGHT / Huntsville
BOOK LENDS INSIGHT TO WAR
I would like to express my appreciation to Northwest Arkansas Newspapers for the recently ended series of articles about the valor of our service men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the continued posting of the casualty lists on the opinion page.
They provide us a reminder and a hint of what we are demanding of our military over there.
For those of your readers who want a deeper insight, may I suggest “The Good Soldiers” by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Finkel. He lived with them, rode with them, experienced their fears, documented their relations with the local authorities, and visited them in the hospital. You will never again think of an improvised explosive device as some homemade, amateurish bomb or think about the casualty list on the opinion page in the same way.
Even with 24 years in the Army and Navy, enlisted and commissioned, I had not grasped the hellishness of this new kind of war.
Whether you are for or against our involvement in that war, I respectfully suggest that unless you have been there or read this book, the basis of your stand is incomplete.
RANDALL WARD / Garfield
Opinion, Pages 5 on 01/26/2010