Right now, all that remains of historic Glade in northeastern Benton County is the Coal Gap School, the heart of the White River community before Beaver Lake changed the landscape.
That situation might change, too, if the Glade Community Historical Society is successful. Thanks to a donation of land across from the school - which happened earlier this week - the old post office might be coming home.
Patricia Williams Heck, vice president of the Glade Community Historical Society, will speak at noon today as part of the Sandwiched In series at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in Springdale. Her program, titled “Dinner’ll Soon Be Ready: Memories of Glade, Ark.,” is based in part on a memoir by Lilly Edens Preston, according to Susan Young, the museum’s outreach coordinator, and in part on Heck’s own memories of growing up in Glade.
“Glade was a farming community where the White River was ever present,” Heck recalled. The White, she said, changed seasonally from “a small, shallow stream we could walk across or ride a horse across to go to Rocky Branch” to a raging river that took out the “Lost Bridge” in the 1940s.
The community, Heck said, dates back to 1858 and got its name when the postmaster applied for a post off ce designation.
“He had another choice,” she said, “but it was turned down. No one knows where ‘Glade’ came from.”
But Heck does know that“growing up there was a wonderful time. All of us were poor, but we didn’t know it. We all played together. We had gardens, and we had entertainment, and everyone walked to school, kids from maybe 40 or 50 families all over those hills.”
School lasted until eighth grade then, she said, “but my aunt, who is now 105, crossed the river in a boat to ‘normal school’ over around Larue so she could teach. No one had the finances to send their children to boarding school.”
By the time Heck and her brothers were ready for high school, they were bused to Rogers - a journey that started before dawn and ended after dark. People moved out and away when the White River was dammed to create Beaver Lake in the early 1960s, and one of the buildings that left Glade was the old post offce, rescued by her father and stored all these years on Heck’s brother’s property in Pea Ridge.
“For the last 15 years or so, we’ve been having the Coal Gap School reunion every year on the Saturday before Memorial Day,” Heck says.
She hopes the chance to bring the post office back to Glade will be another way to make sure the community is remembered.
Life, Pages 6 on 01/16/2013