Water, Hope Spring Eternal For Pettigrew Residents

“South Madison Country is the mother of all rivers,” said Susan Young, outreach coordinator at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in Springdale. The headwaters of the White, Buffalo, Kings, Mulberry and War Eagle rivers all flow out of the mountains in the area.

“There’s a pasture on top of the mountain near Pettigrew,” shared Robert Morgan, manager of environmental quality for the Beaver Water District. “About 200 yards down, there are two ponds. And those ponds never go dry, they tell me.”

Those ponds catch the seepage that marks the headwaters of the White River.The Kings River headwaters lie across the road, and the Buffalo River starts on the same hill, Morgan said.

That Ozark mountain rises about 2,290 feet, according to Morgan’s March blog for the Beaver Water District’s website. “The water soaks into the earth,” the blog reads. “Most of the rainwater is eventually sucked back out of the soil by the grass and transpires back into the atmosphere.

“But a little bit of the water manages to drain on down through the rocks into the ground water. The rest flows slowly downhill through the soil and shallow rocks. In a few hundred yards, the water comes to a small hollow where it seeps back out to the surface.”

The White River appears as a channel about 2 feet wide and 2 inches deep below the ponds, Morgan said.

From this always-trickling water, the White River flows 722 miles into the Mississippi. Beaver Lake, Table Rock Lake, Lake Taneycomo, Bull Shoals Lake and other reservoirs provide drinking water and recreation to people throughout northern Arkansas and southern Missouri.

The river is fed by tributaries along the way, including the Kings, War Eagle, James, Norfork and Black rivers and an infinite number of mountain streams. “It’s a little bit of seeping out of the ground over a large area - and a whole lot more along the way,” Morgan said.

Morgan will be the keynote April 13 at the annual Pettigrew Day celebration. A representative of the Shiloh Museum will be on hand to document historic pictures and record oral histories.

The theme of this year’s event is water. Morgan will discuss the history of Beaver Lake and the 1927 flood on the lower White River.

For eight months, more than 14 percent of the land in Arkansas was underwater, Morgan said. This fl ood changed the way the federal government reacted to natural disasters and the way flood control was handled, he pointed out. Engineers discovered levees wouldn’t hold, and they needed reservoir containment areas upstream: the lakes that lie along the White River.

The residents of Pettigrew don’t fret over floods. Rather, the recent droughts caused concern. Folks around Pettigrew rely on private wells for their water because public water service is not available. During the drought last summer, some of those wells went dry. Louise McCoy, chairman of Pettigrew Day, said her family relies on a well for water. “We used it until the well went dry, and then we had to haul in drinking water,” she explained. The family filtered water from a pond to use for the washing machine, dishes and so forth. The pond also supplies water for their farming operation.

“We were within two weeks of it running dry,” McCoy said.

“The wells are good most years,” Morgan said. “But extreme drought like we had last summer stresses the supply.

“They are looking for ways to get a water line up there,” he added.

McCoy hopes to put together for Pettigrew Day a panel discussion about water service for the area.

“Why is (the Boston community), where the White River starts, the last place in the universe to have water?” she asked. “There’s a certain amount of pessimism and a great need. People feel forgotten by their county.”

“Land and water resources have always defined the history of our rural communities,” Young said.

Life, Pages 8 on 04/03/2013

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