A number of tall tales have been told about Hog Scald. An old-timer told Vance Randolph that he lived near there in the early 1880’s. He said that there used to be a bramble thicket near the potholes, where the road is now. “We used to get the water good and hot,” he explained, “An’ throw the hogs in alive. They’d jump out a-squealin’, an’ run right through them bramble bushes. The thorns would take the bristles off slicker’n a whistle, so we didn’t have to scrape ’em at all.”
Another tale about Hog Scald was told to me recently. It is said to have happened about the turn of the century. The lay of the land is pretty rugged in the Hog Scald neighborhood and one farmer had planted corn and pumpkins on a steep hillside above the hollow. He said he did the planting with a shotgun, shooting the seeds into the hillside. About the time the planting was completed one of the farmer’s brood sows wandered away and he didn’t see her all that summer. When it came time to harvest the crop that fall, the farmer climbed the hill, holding on to the corn stalks and pumpkin vines to keep from falling. The pumpkins were so big that it took only about a dozen to cover an acre. In pulling himself up, he accidentally tore a pumpkin loose from its bearings and it started rolling down the hill. At the foot of the hill it hit a low ledge of rock and burst open. Much to the farmer’s surprise, out jumped the lost sow and thirteen pigs.
I was telling that story down in the Basin Circle Park at Eureka Springs one day. When I got through one of the old-timers asked me if I had ever heard of the big kettle the blacksmiths built at Eureka Springs in the year 1901. I told him that I had never heard of it. “Well,” he said, “it was some kettle. It was so big that the men working on one side couldn’t hear the men hammering on the opposite side.” I pretended to be astonished and asked him what on earth they wanted with such a big kettle. “Why,” he said, solemn like, “to stew them Hog Scald pumpkins in.”
Stafford Photo
Hog Scald Falls below the pits where the pioneers did the scalding
XXIV
BOUNTIES OF NATURE
“Never have I found a place, or a season, without beauty,” wrote the poet, Charles Erskine Scott Wood.
The scenic charm of Eureka Springs is a challenge to the poet’s pen and the artist’s brush. Each season has its own style of beauty that helps erase monotony from man’s benighted world. Spring comes with myriad flowers. The lilac and the honey suckle spill their perfumes lavishly on the hill and in the valley. Early summer spreads a carpet of sweet peas that have escaped from gardens in years past. A little later the white clematis appears and wraps the whole town in beauty. Hundreds of varieties of flowers, reflecting all the varied hues of Nature’s prism, are here from early March until late November.
The tree lover in Eureka Springs has a wealth of beauty for his enjoyment. The elms and maples are the first heralds of spring to coax the bees into action and open Nature’s wooing season. Then comes the sarvis, wild plum, redbud, and dogwood to add perfume and color to the fantasia of spring. In early May the long, purple, bell-shaped flowers of the Paulownia trees hang from bare branches.
The Paulownia or Princess tree is a native of Russia and named for the Princess Paulownia, daughter of the Czar, Paul I, who died in 1801. Its fruit is a green pod as large as a walnut which ripens in autumn and bursts open in winter to loosen the feathery seeds for the wind’s dispersal. The broken pods cling to the tree until pushed off by new growths the following season.