More Than Memories

Pettigrew Day recalls past, supports present

Photo courtesy Shiloh Museum of Ozark History Wayne Martin, one of the founders of Pettigrew Day in Madison County, poses with his "squirrel dog," Tip, around 1938. Now in its 27th year, Pettigrew Day continues to collect history of the community and raises money to preserve the historic schoolhouse now used as a community building. This year's event is Saturday, and trapping and the fur trade will be the topic for a talk by Steve Dunlap.
Photo courtesy Shiloh Museum of Ozark History Wayne Martin, one of the founders of Pettigrew Day in Madison County, poses with his "squirrel dog," Tip, around 1938. Now in its 27th year, Pettigrew Day continues to collect history of the community and raises money to preserve the historic schoolhouse now used as a community building. This year's event is Saturday, and trapping and the fur trade will be the topic for a talk by Steve Dunlap.

It all started with the St. Paul Branch of the Saint Louis & San Francisco Railway -- better known as the Frisco.

When the Frisco brought its terminus to the Madison County community of Pettigrew in 1897, with it came untold riches. The wealth of the region's cash crop -- hardwood lumber -- supported hotels, general stores, a bank, a movie theater with electric lights and a player piano, a grist mill and 12 stave mills. Anything that could be seen in a catalog could be purchased, as long as it could be delivered by train, from a custom-made man's suit to a car -- although there were few roads to drive one on.

Nearly 100 years later, sometime around 1985, it was the Frisco that brought Pettigrew to the attention of Bob Besom, then the director of the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in Springdale.

"The museum had a booth at Pioneer Day in St. Paul, and that was the beginning," says Susan Young, outreach coordinator for museum. "That's when Bob met Wayne Martin."

Martin had always had a passion for the history and preservation of his community, Young remembers, but the relationship with the Shiloh Museum gave it new dimension. Martin was preparing to clean out and sell the contents of the Mooney-Barker Drug Store, a fixture of the community operated by his great-grandfather, Dr. W.H. Mooney, and his grandfather, A.P. Barker, a pharmacist, from 1916 until his grandmother, Helen Mooney Barker, closed it in 1980. And Besom was invited to prowl through its contents.

Sold at auction in January 1986 was everything from an operating table -- which went to a local veterinarian -- to Model T parts, baskets in which bananas were delivered to the store, a gas pump and Magnolia Oil Company sign, shotgun shells and full containers of black powder. But particularly intriguing to Besom were an antique accounts register still full of unpaid bills and all the paperwork from the Citizens Bank of Pettigrew.

"It was an incredible opportunity," Besom said in a Springdale News story in 1988. "It's very unusual to get this kind of ephemeral stuff that wasn't saved by a lot of people."

Beyond the store's contents, Martin had box after box of historic photos, receipts, records, catalogs, newspaper clippings and a head full of information. And he knew there was much more in the attics and back bedrooms of the Madison County Ozarks. Pettigrew Day, a joint effort among Martin, his wife, June, the museum and the Pettigrew community, was established in 1987 to encourage neighbors to share what they had.

"I heard Bob say it many times, and I believe it, that Pettigrew may be the best documented little town in the state of Arkansas," Young says. Over the years, printed records and photographs were joined by oral histories that Young says would "put Pettigrew up with any place in the state."

Go & Do

27th Annual

Pettigrew Day

When: Beginning at 1 p.m. Saturday, with a community supper at 5:30 p.m. and a talk by Steve Dunlap of the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission afterward

Where: Pettigrew Community Building, on Arkansas 16 about 40 miles southeast of Fayetteville

Cost: Dinner is $5, and participants are asked to bring a side dish or dessert

Information: facebook.com/pettig… or Susan Young at 750-8165

What came from Pettigrew has woven its way into nearly every corner of the museum, Young adds, helping tell stories not just about the lumber industry and the railroad but about Arkansans going to World War I and to the West Coast during World War II, about medicine and pharmacy practices, about funeral customs and about trapping and fur trading, which will be the topic of this year's Pettigrew Day on Saturday. Steve Dunlap of the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission will speak after the traditional community dinner at 5:30 p.m., and as always, the day starts with music at 1 p.m., all at the Pettigrew Community Building.

"Pettigrew Day has been, and continues to be, a great example of a community honoring itself," Young says. "Not some historian from someplace else coming in and interpreting it, but the people of the community deciding to remember."

Young says Pettigrew is lucky to have a preserved historic schoolhouse -- now used as the community building -- when so many have fallen into ruin.

"Over the years, Pettigrew Day has become a fundraiser for the community building, and that continues," she says.

What has changed this year is that the museum will not be a partner in the event.

"From the museum's point of view, we were getting fewer and fewer images (to add to the collection)," Young says. "It feels like stepping back and watching a child grow up! We'll always support Pettigrew Day, but the community has taken it and run with it."

That doesn't mean Pettigrew will be forgotten at the museum.

Young is still soliciting photos and ephemera from Madison County and hopes to move forward in time to talk about the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s and the relocation from the rural communities into "town" at the turn of the 21st century.

"Plus we still have a huge, untapped resource of Pettigrew information," Young says, "and we haven't even begun to really mine it. I don't think we'll ever get to the end of it."

Personally, Young says she'll never stop missing Martin, who died in 2010.

"He was not only one of the best friends of my life but one of my touchstones for Ozark history," she says. "He always knew the answers you can't find in a book: How did you skid that log? How did you get the mules to work in the woods? What kind of soda pop was in Granny's store? How did they baptize people?

"There are still so many elders out there with memories we mustn't let go."

NAN Life on 04/09/2014

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