ROGERS — Even though she was a last minute substitute at the Library’s monthly Lunch and Learn series, Monte Harris of the Rogers Historic Museum was ready. She brought along two “stories” about historic sites in the area.

The monthly Lunch and Learn program sponsored by the Friends of the Library was supposed to be about historic landmarks in Benton County, but the presenter was called away with a family emergency. Harris, a native of Benton County and the adult program specialist at the museum, was happy to fill in.

The stories she presented both had to do with buildings and with surprises. First she talked about Callahan Station.

Callahan Station was a stage coach stop and inn built before the Civil War. In fact, a local Confederate regiment was formed at the inn.

For years a large building on Spruce Street was thought to be Callahan Station.

The building, now the home of the Office of Human Concern, is also known as the old Love Hospital. It’s a historic building in its own right, Harris said, but it’s not old enough to be Callahan Station. The building on Spruce Street datesback to the 1870s, Harris said. It wasn’t there when those Confederate soldiers met.

“Sometimes the best way to do research is just to poke around,” Harris said. She was poking around in old records when she came across photos of the old Electric Springs Hotel. Electric Springs is located along Arkansas Highway 12 east of downtown, where the road drops down to Prairie Creek.

Electric Springs, she said, was a retirement community that wasn’t actually part of the young city of Rogers. It was made up of tiny plots with summer cottages. The springs were thought to be healthy.

It’s difficult to picture where the hotel must have been because the topography of the area has changed, Harris said. When Highway 12 was built, the road bed was raised because of a history of flooding in the area. In fact, some of the photos Harris found were pictures of workers ready to repair the road near the Electric Springs Hotel, she said. Not only was Highway 12 not in existence during that era, neither was Lake Atalanta. Instead there was a valley that sheltered the summer houses.

Eventually, Harris found research that had been done by J. Reeves in 1941. Reeves salvaged some pieces of the old hotel as it was being demolished and he was the one who realized the staircase, made of black walnut wood, was valuable. Harris believes pieces of that stairway still exist and the museum wants to find them. Reeves’ research shows that the hotel was built in the 1840s; Harris believes it was built by Callahan as a stage coach stop.

The site of the Electric Springs Hotel can be seen along Highway 12 on the way to Beaver Lake. It’s at the end of the “S” curve, she said, and you can see, alongside the road, where two springs surface. There’s an empty lot across from the springs and that was where the hotel once stood.

If Harris was surprised to discover the true location of the Callahan Station, she was even more surprised when a legend about an old school house turned out to be fact.

Harris had heard an old schoolhouse was somehow contained inside a home in Bentonville. She had once visited the home when siding was being added and thought she could see evidence of an old log cabin in the front wall. When the city of Bentonville announced plans to demolish the home to build a new parking lot, Harris got permission to look inside.

Because the house was going to be demolished anyway, she decided to put a hole in the wall and look for the original log cabin. What she found instead was brick.

With demolition scheduled in only a few days, Harris started researching.

Much of the information she needed had been published in the “Benton County Pioneer,” the county’s Historical Society newsletter.

There were actually two schools in that location, she explained. The first was a log cabin that was built in 1841. It was a subscription school - meaning it was built, not with tax dollars, but with money from area residents including some who lived in the area that would become Rogers. That school, Harris said, was burned during the Civil War, possibly after being usedas a hospital. At some point Confederate soldiers where buried in the yard, but the bodies were later moved to what is now Bentonville Cemetery.

The second school, on the same site, was built in 1866 as a Sabbath School. Harris explained that the Presbyterian Church built the school, but allowed it be used by the entire community.

That building was brick.

Harris realized the bricks she saw inside the walls were almost certainly the bricks of the Sabbath School.

One of the teachers who worked there was the mother of a well-known Rogers resident, Betty Blake, the wife of Will Rogers.

The building is in good condition, Harris said, and the city dropped plans to tear it down. Now, she’s waiting for an expert to devise a plan that will preserve the school while removing the building around it.

“It’s been packed away in a little box for 100 years,” she said.

“You never know what you may be passing,” she said. “We’ve been driving back and forth, and walking back and forth for years.”

No one knew they were passing a historic landmark inside an ordinary home.

News, Pages 1 on 10/21/2009

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Cadron_Boy says...

The Electric Springs hotel and Callahan (Callaghan) tavern and stage coach stop are two separate localities. The tavern -- nothing more than a simple log cabin -- operated by Dennis Callahan stood beside Callahan's Spring -- the spring box and other improvements are still visible. The small rough cabin could never be confused the large building on Spruce Street first known as The Summit Hotel (probably built by Reuben Wallace sometime after 1871) later called the Love Sanitarium, and which is now the Office of Human Concern -- however the land on which the Summit Hotel stands was originally held by George Jewell Callahan who received a patent on the land in 1849. The simple log inn --Callahan's Tavern -- that once stood at the foot of the hill was burned down in the Civil War.

As to Electric Springs -- no doubt its history is mingled with that of the Butterfield stage after the Civil War. No less than three hotels (and an assortment of boarding homes and cottages) were centered around the springs by the late 1800s; however, to my knowledge none of these were built until after the civil war. If Mr. Reeves has information to the contrary I would certainly appreciate knowing more.... I believe the confusion between the two localities may arise because out-of-town railroad workers lodging at Electric Springs upon opening of the railroad in 1880s may have confused it with nearby Callahan Spring where there was a separate work camp.

John Svendsen

November 9, 2009 at 7:40 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )