"I tend to have a lot of resentment toward people who haven't grown up here because I feel that these are the invaders that have ruined my town," the 18-year old popcorn girl at the U-Ark Theater told Meg Kilgore in the interview that accompanied her portrait, part of Andrew Kilgore's Fayetteville Townfolk series.
City booster Hal Douglas, born in 1906, told the Kilgores, "I was very active in trying to get things done, get things here, see that the population increased. Today, I'm not so positive that that's one of the best things that happened."
His portrait and interview are dated October 1980. The population of Fayetteville in 1980 was 36,608. Its population as of 2020 was 93,949. The complaints about growth have echoed down the decades. The first one I heard in person was in 2003, from a native of the Bronx who had moved to Washington County in the early 1980s, part of the back-to-the-land movement.
A preservationist and conservative should be sympathetic to complaints about growth and change, but I think the ones doing the complaining, especially the old hippies, are missing the point. Fayetteville can support 100,000 people or more, easy. It just can't support 100,000 cars, no matter how many progressive bumper stickers you plaster on them.
It is truly alarming to think that rising property values and thus rising property taxes could cause any old-timer to lose his property. If that is a real threat to anyone, then by all means, let's have some safeguards. But I suspect that what a lot of people really mean when they complain about growth in Fayetteville is that they have to sit in traffic much longer than they used to, and that it's hard to find a place to park.
There's an easy solution, and the core of Fayetteville already has incredible infrastructure in place for it: walk. Everyone in Fayetteville who is capable of walking should be walking. Anyone in a car is missing out on the old charm that makes Fayetteville so attractive in the first place.
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The net change in elevation from the spring at the bottom of Spring Street to the cross at the Mount Sequoyah lookout is 342 feet. For a few weeks this month I made the trek once or twice a day, and I was happy; the struggle with gravity dissolves the modern malaise.
The old Fayetteville magic still lives around and above the spring. It's the site of the first modern settlement in Fayetteville, the homestead of Mary and James McGarrah (pronounced McGarr) and their three sons.
The sidewalk up the hill is overgrown; the trees and shrubs provide merciful shade from the morning sun. Shadow and light play on their roots and the old rock spring house and sections of old wire fence. The sidewalk graffiti still asks "R U Kind?"
After many pauses for breath and to admire rocks and deer, I pass the house where Ellen Gilchrist lived from 1978 to 1985, and pause to pay my respects. Thanks to a Sunday morning downpour, I am now friends with the owners. That never would have happened had I driven up the mountain. The automobile precludes these little connections that make Fayetteville Fayetteville.
Then I walk to the north side of Mount Sequoyah to the Fay Jones house where Ellen lived from 1987-2013. She would wholly approve. "Nothing makes me happier than to see one of my students exercising," she once told me beside the lap pool at the Fayetteville Athletic Club, "'cause that's where it all begins." Or as she said in print, "Exercise is the meat and bread of my existence. The single most important thing I do and the thing on which my mental and physical health depend."
From Ellen's second house, I take the most gradual slope back to town (to protect the knees). On the way, in someone's front yard, is a 10-foot sculpture (plus pedestal) of a female nude. She seems to have been carved from the trunk of a tree. Arms over her head, she is facing the house. Her hips are a little too narrow, and to keep her from toppling, the sculptor gave up on defining her lower legs, but I admire any attempt to represent the human form, almost as much as I admire the audacity of the people who placed a 10-foot naked woman in their front yard.
After lunch at the Co-Op, I head up to Special Collections to read, passing the Walker-Stone house, built by David Walker in 1845. Walker sold the house to Stephen Stone in 1850.
Stephen Stone opened a grocery in Fayetteville in 1850, then expanded into dry goods and implements, presumably on the town square.
Stone and his wife, Amanda Brodie, kept the house until their deaths in 1909 and 1912, respectively. Their son Benjamin (one of seven children) was the father of the architect Edward Durrell Stone, who owned the house when it was listed on the National Register in 1970.
David Walker was one of the men of our state who resisted secession until he didn't; he was made president of the Secession Convention in 1861. Our secession was tragic, but Walker survived to become chief justice of the Supreme Court of Arkansas. He died after being thrown from a buggy in 1879.
Walker donated the land for Sophia Sawyer's Fayetteville Female Seminary, one of two antebellum female seminaries in Fayetteville, at the corner of Mountain and School. In spite of new construction, many whole blocks in this area south of Dickson Street and west of the square still draw up that old Fayetteville feeling, and offer shade from the afternoon sun.
The Evergreen Cemetery offers a shortcut as well as more shade. Archibald Yell is buried here. He came to Fayetteville in 1835, after Andrew Jackson made him a territorial circuit judge. His marker says, "Yell received limited formal education but a sound instruction in law." It's pleasing to learn that by 1827, in Shelbyville, Tenn., he had formed a law partnership with his former teacher, William Gilchrist.