SPRINGDALE — It’s more than a year off and already Susan Young is rallying the troops. OK, re-enactors.
For the northwest quadrant of the state, 2012 will bring the area’s Civil War Sesquicentennial celebrations and remembrances. The Arkansas Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission has themed each of the five years, and 2012 is “A Divided Arkansas,” and the focus is here.
In March 1862, an outmanned Union army under Brig. Gen. Samuel Curtisbested the Confederates at Pea Ridge, and in December the two sides fought to a decisive stalemate in Prairie Grove that secured the Union position in Northwest Arkansas.
So, 2012 is Northwest Arkansas’ year, and on an evening earlier this month folks from area historical groups and education centers met at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History to plan for the protracted anniversary.
“Grab some coffee,” Young ordered. “My idea of heavy hors d’oeuvres is peanut butter crackers, and there’s some there ...,”
“I brought brownies,”said Dee Dee Lamb.
“Dee Dee brought brownies. Let’s hear it for Dee Dee!”
Yea, they shouted.
Let it be written into the record that they banded over brownies.
Far from competing cares, the meeting was a pep rally of possibilities. Lamb would like a ball in period costume scheduled for February, marking the end of polite society in Northwest Arkansas for a while. Processional dances, recitations, flag presentations - “I’m thinking big because no one told me tostop thinking big,” she said.
Jon Benedict, on the other hand, would just like to produce some souvenir place mats for the event. Say, 11-by-14-inch linens with a timeline and photos of the Northwest Arkansas campaigns.
There was also talk of a souvenir scorecard system for keeping track of all the living- history events an enthusiast has attended. Perhaps a vintage baseball game. Of course, the re-enactments.
“How do we know we are telling an accurate story?” someone said.
“How are we going to tell everybody’s story?” Young wants to know. “I’ve been up here an hour, and I haven’t heard one thing about slaves.And how are we going to tell the story of hill people who didn’t give a hoot? Because we are going to do our best to tell everybody’s story.”
This is important to the Fayetteville native, who vividly remembers the impression a school visit to Pea Ridge battlefield in the early 1960s left on her. “I can still see ... a house, a big two-story house, and really feeling a sense of place. Like I was where history had happened.”
She didn’t receive a history degree but majored in agriculture. She came into the position of outreach coordinator for the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History simply by volunteering and has been at it since 1994.
For these sesquicentennial events, Young shares the stage with an enthusiastic cast of players. One is Kate Barger, president of the Prairie Grove chapter of theUnited Daughters of the Confederacy. Among other things, the organization raises money to memorialize soldiers and tend their graves.
The 32-year-old brought her son Adam to the Oct. 4 meeting. At 5, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks hold no memories and never will, but “he’s been doing living history with me since he was 21/2, and he knows that a long time ago, long before he was born, people fought to keep their farms, keep their land, for what they thought was right at the time. He knows people died there [at the Prairie Grove battleground], and they deserve to be honored.”
For Barger, who wasn’t alive during the bicentennial celebrations in 1976, this may be the biggest anniversary of a major American event that she will have the opportunityto experience.
“When do you want to meet again?” Young asked the group.
“2012,” someone shouted.
A crescendo of laughs.
The compromise position emerged as Nov. 8.
To share your thoughts with Young, e-mail her at syoung@springdalear.
gov.
Northwest Profile, Pages 39 on 10/17/2010