What this is
Pea Ridge Battle is a free, public-facing interactive study of the December 1861 to March 1862 campaign that culminated in the Battle of Pea Ridge. It pairs an OpenStreetMap base layer with hand-drawn period roads (Wire/Telegraph, Bentonville Detour, Ford, Huntsville) and pins fifty distinct events along the campaign trail from Rolla, Missouri to Van Buren, Arkansas. Each event includes tactical context, commander biographies, primary source quotations, casualty figures, and historical marker references where available.
It is designed for three readers: the visitor who has just walked the battlefield and wants to make sense of what they saw, the educator who needs an accessible classroom resource, and the researcher or preservation professional who needs cited geographic context. It is free to use and requires no account or registration.
Who built it
Steven Barrow is a licensed Professional Engineer and Eagle Scout who lives on an eight-acre property in the Garfield/Bentonville area of Benton County, four miles from Pea Ridge National Military Park. He runs Patronus Energy LLC, an engineering and safety consulting firm specializing in process safety management and facilities engineering. He is a regular visitor to the park and the wider Pea Ridge battlefield landscape.
This project is built and maintained independently. It is not affiliated with the National Park Service, the City of Pea Ridge, the Pea Ridge National Military Park Foundation, or any heritage organization, though it draws extensively on their published scholarship and physical markers.
The research methodology, full bibliography, and GPS coordinate verification protocol are documented on the Sources & Methodology page.
Why it matters here
Pea Ridge was the largest Civil War battle west of the Mississippi River and the engagement that kept Missouri in the Union for the remainder of the war. Northwest Arkansas was overwhelmingly Unionist before the war and was devastated by it. Most visitors to the park, including residents, finish the auto tour without a clear mental model of how Van Dorn's flank march turned the Federal rear into the Federal front, why the artillery faces every direction, or how the ten tour stops connect into a coherent narrative.
This project exists because that gap is real, and because the material to fill it already exists. It just needs to be assembled, cited, mapped, and made interactive.
What is built and what is next
Currently working: Interactive map with three toggleable layers (modern basemap, 1862 period roads, place labels), fifty chronologically ordered events with time-of-day breakdown for the heavy fighting on March 7 and 8, commander biographies for twenty officers on both sides, primary source quotations, casualty figures where documented, and historical marker references for over twenty events.
On the roadmap: A georeferenced overlay of the 1862 Library of Congress engineering map of the battlefield, a systematic integration of every Civil War historical marker in Benton, Washington, McDonald, and Barry counties from the Historical Marker Database, animated troop movement arrows that advance with the timeline, and a docent walking-tour mode that sequences events to match a physical visit to the park.
If you are interested in supporting or partnering on any phase of this work, the contact information below is the right place to start.
Get in touch
If you are with the City of Pea Ridge, Pea Ridge National Military Park, the Pea Ridge National Military Park Foundation, the Arkansas Department of Parks Heritage and Tourism, the Walton Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, or any organization with an interest in battlefield preservation, heritage tourism, or Civil War education in the region, I would be glad to hear from you.
Reasons you might want to:
- Use this in school curricula or visitor center kiosks (the codebase is structured to be easily customized)
- Discuss a partnership to expand coverage to Prairie Grove, Cane Hill, Wilson's Creek, or other related sites
- Fund the next phase of work, including the historical marker integration and the georeferenced 1862 map overlay
- Suggest corrections, additions, or sources I have missed
Email: steven.barrow@patronusenergy.com
Web: www.stevensbarrow.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/steven-barrow-pe
The cannons in the park face every direction because the battle they are recreating moved every direction. This site exists to help people see that.