Holcomb Street and Holcomb Elementary School might be the most everyday reminders of the connections to the past, but the name Holcomb is woven into the history of both 19th century Springdale and 20th century Fayetteville.
It was only recently, said Susan Young, outreach coordinator for the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History, that researchers found out Springdale actually may have started life as “Holcomb’s Spring,” not Shiloh.
John and Dorothea Holcomb came to Northwest Arkansas in the late 1830s, Young explained, and had 16 children.
“They are credited with being the founders of Springdale,” she said.
“He laid out the town, and their son, Joseph, was the first mayor.”
Later, “it was Sarah Reed Meek who came up with the name ‘Springs in the Dale,’ in honor of the natural springs which fed the creek running through Shiloh,” Young added.
“A shortened version of Sarah’s suggestion was chosen, and in 1872, with the establishment of a post office, Springdale was born.”
The first Reeds to come to Springdale, John David and Sarah Reed arrived in 1851. (Sarah remarried after her husband’s death and became SarahReed Meek.)
Being a small settlement that grew into a small town, the Reed and Holcomb families crossed paths during the early years of Springdale, and their stories entwined further when, in 1946, Henrietta Kimbrough - the great-granddaughter of John David and Sarah Reed - married Herbert Holcomb. Ironically, they met and started dating in Washington, D.C., although they’d gone to school together in Springdale. The couple came home to Northwest Arkansas and soon started the next generation - a family of three children.
“The Holcombs have always been very aware of their family history, as have we, but as we talked more about the Reed family in the last couple of years, it became clear that they would be the perfect example of an everyday Springdale family,” Young said.
Thus was born “Their Story, Our Story: The Reed Family of Springdale,” an exhibit opening April 8 at the Shiloh Museum. The goal, Young said, is to “inspire people to reflect on their own family story and ask how that everyday family history is part of the fabric of local and regional history.”
Putting together “Their Story, Our Story” was something of a challenge, Young admitted, because the museum had only a few family artifacts. As curator of the exhibit, Young decided to focus on the first three generations of Reeds in Springdale and, using primarily information that Henrietta Holcomb shared, look at the family “through the filter of a total outsider: me.”
“What I came away with as the important parts of this family’s story were four things,” she said.
Family
Farming
Faith
Education
It’s the fourth that makes the everyday family a little more extraordinary, Young added.
“Of the eight children in the third generation of Reeds in Springdale, almost every one of them was a school teacher at some time or another,” Young said. “Education was something highly esteemed and expected.”
Margaret Holcomb, Henrietta’s daughter, explained that both her mother and her grandmother, Lydia Reed Kimbrough, taught at Stony Point School west of Springdale. Then, she said, Henrietta moved on to Fayetteville, finally completing her career as an assistant superintendent. Holcomb Elementary School is named after her.
“We were bred on family history,” Margaret Holcomb said. “We have storytellers on all sides of our family, and all of us who grew up in Washington County know these stories and these people.”
Much of the research for the Shiloh Museum exhibit had already been done by Henrietta Holcomb over the years that she “collected and compiled into scrapbooks” pieces of her family’s past. When the idea of an exhibit came up, the family helped with the “additional legwork to tie up some unfinished tidbits,” Margaret Holcomb said.
Along with the stories, Young has chosen to illustrate the exhibit with items representative of the Reed family story.
“Elizabeth Reed, the matriarch, was the heart of the family, and we do have her bonnet,” Young said, “but we also know that she was a typical Ozark woman, and all Ozark mamas and grandmas kept busy feeding their families. So we’ll also show kitchen items like a rolling pin and a food chopper, evocative of the message we’re trying to get across.”
Young and Margaret Holcomb both described the Reed family not as movers and shakers - or rich and famous - but as the people quietly “providing the support to keep a community growing and moving,” as Holcomb put it.
“That’s where most families live,” she said.
“And those are the stories we specialize in,” Young added.
To tell those stories requires the passion the Reeds and Holcombs have shown in recording and sharing their personal histories, she pointed out. And Margaret Holcomb promised the interest will continue in her family.
“We’re now grooming” the seventh and eighth generations of Reeds and the ninth and 10th generations of Holcombs, she said.
Although her own family was formed through adoption, Holcomb said Frank, Emma and Rose - and her first grandchild, Jesyanne - have been steeped in the family history through visits to the family farm.
“They got to know (their grandmother) through her house and her woods and the pictures in the corner cabinet,” she said, “all the subtle ways you carry on history.”
Life, Pages 6 on 03/27/2013