Velda Brotherton

Tucked up in the rugged hills and fertile valleys of northwest Arkansas is the city of Springdale. Once a Native American community and officially settled as Shiloh, the region that would be Springdale attracted immigrant pioneers beginning in 1828 and rapidly flourished, establishing gainful agricultural, commercial and manufacturing industries.

During the Civil War the community felt the disastrous effects of the battles of Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove, which drained resources and stunted morale. Springdale residents struggled to maintain their livelihood, but it was not until the institution of the railroad in 1882 that their recovery caught fire.

In the wilderness of the Springfield Plateau, buffalo once grazed belly-deep in prairie grass, deer and elk roamed, rabbit and squirrel frolicked. To the south, the Boston Mountains of the Arkansas Ozarks rose like ancient sentinels against a crystal blue sky. The King, the Buffalo, the White, the War Eagle, all rivers nourished by springs and creeks that flowed from the oldest mountains in North America, their majestic grandeur long since eroded by time, found their mouths and journeyed to the sea.

Settlers arrived in the county briefly known as Lovely on the heels of the Choctaw, the Osage, and the Cherokee, then and forevermore removed to the Indians Nations a few miles to the west. These God-fearing folk had no notion that the first people to settle this land believed it could never truly belong to anyone.

Hungry for land to call their own, the settlers homesteaded the wilderness. Near an abundant spring of crystalline water, the newcomers carved out their farms, eagerly building homes on this plateau in the Ozarks of Arkansas Territory, with its lush land and abundant game, its pure water and virgin timber. Here, they would raise their families and grow crops in the rich soil. Through both hard and bountiful times, they would worship, toil, laugh, love, live, and die.