School Buses of the past

A.C. Beasley, member of the Ozone School Board and Howard Troyer, school bus driver with the surplus army ambulance that served as bus from Garber to Salus, where the students got on a regular school bus to continue on to Ozone School.
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Schools have changed so many ways thru the years. One of the big changes is the school buses. A big part of the school system now is the bus garages, shops, and yellow buses of various sizes.

On upper Little Piney Creek in northern Johnson Co. Arkansas there were three schools. The first was Ozone, then Mt. Pleasant and about four miles down the creek was the Union School House at Mt. Levi. There were no buses, children walked or rode their horses. The Mt. Pleasant school was a log building near the creek just before you came to G.W. Warren's farm. When the Mt. Pleasant school house burned, Alexander Beasley donated land and helped build a new school building between Warren's farm and the Beasley farm. By 1940-41 there were only two children attending Mt. Pleasant, Jessie Beasley and her niece Nedra Casey. The school was closed and the girls were taken to Union School by bus. The bus was a pickup owned and driven by Richard Bean whose wife Velma, was the teacher at Union.

In September 1947 Union School was donated to the Union Community as the students were then attending Lamar Schools except for those from the Mt. Pleasant school district. Jesus and Nedra were being transported from Garber to Salus in a jeep belong to Truman Warren. At Salus they transferred from the jeep to a school bus and on to Ozone School.

A.C. Beasley of Garber represented the Mt Pleasant school area on the Ozone School Board.
The jeep was no longer large enough to hold Jessie and Nedra and the students it picked up from the Rosetta Mountain area enroute to Salus. Mr. Beasley requested a bigger bus. One day he went to Clarksville and he was brought home by Howard Troyer in a 'retired' army ambulance.
The ambulance was the new school bus and Mr. Troyer the bus driver who took the students to Salus each morning and returned them to their homes each evening.

Today there are no school buses going up the Little Piney Road to Ozone. No children live there where back in the 1840's people were moving in from the east to establish homes and fulfill dreams of owning their own farms. By 1940 many had left during the great depression to find jobs and more left during WWII. ....today most of the farms are part of the Ozark National Forest, no one lives on upper Little Piney Creek. Where once there were communities of people living, today there are a few private cabins and campsites with hunters and four wheelers everywhere. The families have come and gone. The schools, Ozone, Mt. Pleasant and Union are gone and the villages- Garber with it's PO, grist mill, blacksmith shop, store and Mt. Levi where a store, PO, gas pump and doctor lived are also gone. Ozone is still there and a big yellow bus picks up the school children and takes them down a blacktopped road to school in Clarksville. The students from Union ride a yellow school bus to Lamar but there was never a school bus at the Mt. Pleasant school.

postscript: . The Union Community has been reorganized and in Feburary 2011 the Union School House was named to the National Register of Historical Places. The Mt. Pleasant school
burnt years ago and Ozone school is used by the community.

More on the First Telegraph Lines in Arkansas

Picture taken in 1970's of the commissary at Fort Smith.


The first telegraph wire to span between Little Rock and Memphis was completed in 1860.

The first telegraph sent from Little Rock was sent on January 31, 1861, and was sent by an attorney, John M. Harrel.

"The United States Troops at the outposts of the western frontier of the state and in the Indian nation have all been recalled from winter quarters to reinforce the garrison at Ft. Smith. The garrison at Ft. Smith had been previously transferred to the United States Arsenal in this city(Little Rock). The arsenal is one of the richest depositories of military store in the United States and is supposed to be the ultimate destination of the tropps (sic) ordered from the frontier."

Old Wire Road has a history....

What do you see when you drive down Highway 352 in Franklin Co., Ar.

This cabin wasn't here before the Civil War but I bet there was one nearby . If it could talk what a history it would tell us.

These look like they could of been used as spring houses or maybe a small cellars.

You use a bridge on a blacktop
road to cross Horsehead Creek now.

Close your eyes and pretend you are

are sitting on the back of a wagon with your legs dangling off the wagon. Can you feel the cool water as the wagon crosses the creek.

Scenes along Old Wire Road--

(State Highway 352 in Franklin

County, Arkansas)

Before the Civil War the telegraph wire crossed this great land of ours connecting family, friends and businesses. Roads ran along the wires and became known as Wire Road, Old Wire Road, etc. When we go to Clarksville, Ar. from our home north of Ozark we travel along state highway 352, also known as Wire Road and it has touched the lives of seven generations of my family. In 1865 my great grandfather Quinton Dillard Beasley was in the Union Army stationed at Clarksville. His duty was to patrol the telegraph line from Clarksville to Fort Smith. He rode his own mare and in his claim to the Southern Claims Commission he said it was a 'fine mare' and put the worth at $150.00. One day in January 1865 the 2nd Kansas Calvary came to Clarksville and they attempted to buy Grandpa's mare, telling him he could sell it or they would take anyway. He refused thinking his Colonel would not let them take his horse. When the 2nd Cav from Kansas left, the mare went too. In 1878 he received $125.00 from the government for the loss of his mare. Have wondered if he had to walk or did they furnish him another horse?

As we travel back and forth along Wire Road I find myself thinking Grandpa Dill rode up and down this road, and many members of the family as one of his daughters married a man from Ozark and they visited back and forth thru the years. A sister-in-law and family lived here before going to Arizona in the 1880's. The stretch of road we travel is pasture land, reclaimed mining land, timberland, and goes by a cemetery and a country church. We cross Horsehead Creek and Dirty Creek and I find myself wondering what it was like when Grandpa rode 'the wire'. I wish I was able to climb thru or over fences to get pictures close up but these pics may cause you to look closer at what you pass and never reflect on. Seven generations of the Beasley family have traveled this road, from the time the telegraph wire began to sing to now as the telephone line follows along Wire Road. As communications advance it won't long that there will be no wires for a road to follow.

A Pioneer Woman of the 1900's.

Susie Lavonia Ober Beasley
born Mossville, Newton Co. Ar.April 7, 1889
died Clarksville, Johnson Co. Ar. Jan 24, 1956
buried Oakland Cemetery, Clarksville.

Married Arthur Claude Beasley. April 17, 1906 at
Swain, Newton Co. Ar.

She was one of the last of what history refers to as a
"Pioneer Woman"


She grew the food, made the clothes, gathered herbs for healing and cooking, raised the children, milked the cows, worked in the fields, took in boarders, nursed the sick, laid out the dead-making the pillows and linings for the homemade coffins and all the other 'chores' that enabled a family to exist.

She had large vegetable and flower gardens with rock fences to keep out the animals. In one corner of her vegetable garden I remember gooseberry bushes and a few tobacco plants. She kept her tobacco 'twists' in a flat wooded apricot box under the bed. A smoke house was used to cure the meat of homegrown pigs and cattle.

In her front yard was a glower garden, where she raised asparagus at the end of a row of roses.
This was used at decoration time in the many flower arrangements she made. Dozens of flowers were made of tissue paper to supplement the wild roses and flowers growing along the fence rows and in the fields. Starting the first Sunday in May, Decoration Day ran throughout the summer.

Union Cemetery on Memorial Sunday, Rosetta the first Sunday in June, along with Russell Cemetery in Ozone were among the 'must attend'. If transportation was available they went to Mossville Cemetery decoration where Grandma Ober was buried. Grandma wearing a new homemade 'decoration dress' and hat loaded up the wagon with food and flowers, grandpa in his white shirt, the kids, friends and relatives made up a caravan of wagons and horses off to the cemetery to see family and friends. Some they wouldn't see until the next summer when Decoration came again.

Grandma was an excellent seamstress and I can imagine the joy she felt when she got her first treadle machine. Her daughters were among the 'best dressed' in the community. The coat she wore to milk in was an original ' coat of many colors' that Dolly Parton wrote and sang of. Grandma had cut in various shapes and colors pieces of scrap material, sewed them together, and then did briar stitch embroidery on each seam, cut out and sewed the jacket, lining it with and old blanket. I thought it was beautiful.

In a letter to her older sister Bertie, she urged Bertie to carry her own wood and water as she did. She wanted her husband "Bum" to be a strong old man.

There was always company, especially in the winter when men couldn't work ( a lot of them could be referred to as 'free loaders') so grandma canned in half gallon jars using washtubs placed over a campfire. Years latered she commented that her children didn't eat certain foods anymore. Her daughter-in-law reminded her that the children never did eat those foods, but there was so many around the long kitchen table that Grandma was to busy to notice who ate what. With the money she received from timber/sawmill worker boarders she saved and bought a battery radio. It had a long wire antenna that stretched through the trees for several yards like a telephone wire. She ordered the radio from Sears Roebuck and Co. along with an extra set of the glass tubes it used. If one blew out she would immediately order a replacement so they always could listen to the radio.

They built a new house when my daddy was a young lad. Grandma did not have door sills put in so she could just sweep the dirt right out the door. She built her own kitchen cabinets out of scrap wood and wooden boxes. Some of them had curtains instead of doors. She made her quilts, her brooms, caned bottoms for her chairs, crocheted and made rugs out of necessity. Today these are called crafts. An educated woman she loved to read and used coal light (kerosene) lamps for light.

She dug roots and peeled bark sending full mail bags to the Chicago Drug houses to used used in making medicine. This brought in some cash. In the 1920's she became postmaster for Garber. They build a small wooden building which was the PO and a store. Supplies were brought in from Clarksville. She kept a basket packed and was ready when a neighbor needed help with illness or accidents. She helped a neighbor deliver twins and then buried them in the lady's flowerbed.

For a number of years in the fall she sent me a matchbox of chinquapin nuts because she knew how much I loved them and they weren't available in Oklahoma where we lived. I still treasure a small black autograph book with my name in gold that she sent me for my 8th birthday.

Sears and Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs were read from cover to cover, new styles, new inventions, everything, it was there. Grandma used them to look at when she designed and made clothes and curtains. The old catalogs were used by the children for paper dolls. My cousin envied me my cut out paper dolls and I envied her the catalog dolls.

Grandma raised a son, four daughters and a grandaughter in very primitive circumstances but
she managed to provide them with things that most of the neighbors didn't have. I can only imagine the wonders upon wonders Grandma felt when they moved to 20 acres on the edge of Clarksville in the fall of 1947. A pump in a pump house, no more well with a lard bucket on a rope, electricity, a wringer washer and Uncle Ester gave her a new and her first refrigerator.
Later then moved into Clarksville, no more cows to milk, walking distance to 'downtown' and their first indoor bathroom.

Her hard life came to an end at the age of 66, sitting in her rocker, laughing at a joke. She left this world as she went through it' enjoying life'.