Signs will go up in the spring marking 126 miles of trails used for guerrilla warfare during the Civil War.
The new trails were approved Wednesday by the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission to be included in the area’s Heritage Trails network.
Most of the new “trails” are along highways in western Benton and Washington counties, including Arkansas 43 and 59, which trace the Oklahoma border for about 50 miles from Evansville north to Maysville.
The Civil War guerrilla trails also include Arkansas 12 from Bentonville to Maysville, Dawn Hill East Road from Siloam Springs to Springtown, and Mill Dam Road between Cave Springs and Highfill.
Initially, the only changes people will see are about 50 new signs and designations on Heritage Trail maps, said John McLarty, president of Heritage Trail Partners.
But with the trail designation, the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department will construct wide shoulders where possible ifthose highways are improved in the future, McLarty said. New shoulders would be 5 to 8 feet wide, which could easily accommodate bicyclists and would be safer if motorists need to pull over because of car trouble, he said.
“The infrastructure improvements are very longterm,” McLarty said.
When asked about sidewalks at Wednesday’s meeting, McLarty said they wouldn’t be included because the trails are in rural areas.
“No one is proposing we build a sidewalk from Strickler to Hogeye along Highway 65,” he told the group.
Strickler is 7 miles from Hogeye.
Rick Parker of Siloam Springs said he worked for a decade on research that resulted in the new designations. Parker’s research also resulted in a 1,500-page, three-volume history of the Civil War, which he plans to publish.
Parker said the new trail designations on signs and maps will help preserve Northwest Arkansas’ history. Fifty years from now, people will see the signs and know Civil War activities occurred in the area, he said. Such things can prompt people to do their own research.
“Now we’ve identified these sites, and we’re going to have some documentation of what happened here,” said Parker, a historian and fine-arts conservator for the Smithsonian Institution. “We’ve lost so much, but now we’re getting some of it back.”
Parker said the guerrilla warfare aspect of the Civil War in Northwest Arkansas has been overlooked by historians. History books focus only on the area’s major battles: Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove.
“It was just on-again, offagain gang warfare,” Parkersaid of guerrilla activity in Northwest Arkansas.
The Civil War ended in 1865, but in some parts of the Ozark Mountains, including Benton and Washington counties, guerrilla activity continued for years, he said.
A guerrilla is “a person who engages in irregular warfare especially as a member of an independent unit carrying out harassment and sabotage,” according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
Parker said he read many first-hand accounts during his research, including diaries, scrapbooks and letters.
Heritage Trail Partners is a nonprofit organization that works to map historic trails and encourage bicycle lanes and sidewalks when improvements are made to roads that follow those trails.
McLarty said 99 percent of the Heritage Trails in Northwest Arkansas are along roadways. The two segments that aren’t on roads are in Pea Ridge National Military Park and near Lake Fayetteville.
Northwest Arkansas’ Heritage Trail Plan already includes the Cherokee Trail of Tears, the Butterfield Overland Mail Route and other Civil War trails. In some places, those trails are the same, following an 1820s military road from Springfield, Mo., to Fort Smith.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 10/25/2013