DARDANELLE — The McElroy House in Dardanelle is somewhat of a puzzle, yet with careful exploration and time to investigate, one can detect several key aspects of this unique nonprofit organization.
It is more than a building, yet it connects to a small house located near Front Street.
It offers workshops on container gardening, rain-barrel making and cloth diapering yet is more than these occasional workshops.
It sponsors an annual Harvest Run fundraiser yet doesn’t seek to become a big-money nonprofit.
“It’s a slow building up of community,” founder Meredith Martin Moats said. “We want to get a feel for what others think are solutions to their own problems. We hope to bring things together around all kinds of ideas across cultures, race and class.”
Together with Dover native Marie Williams, an adjunct history instructor at Arkansas Tech University in Russellville, the women are working to create an idea center in the River Valley. During an internship while completing her bachelor’s degree in history at Arkansas Tech, Williams met Moats.
“The McElroy House is an idea to form local solutions to local problems or issues,” Williams said. “We find out what people want to do, or people approach us with something that they want to do. It’s about connecting the people who have knowledge with those who need the information.”
The model is not one based on quick results because those problems often include poverty, racism, drug use, illiteracy and other ills of society that are often addressed using conventional means.
“But we’re more about helping people learn how to live sustainably,” Williams said. “We often start out by asking people about their gardens. We have seen the discussion of gardening as a constructive way to bridge the gap between the generations — and to get young people involved in the process.”
She said the results of the inquiries will go into a local gardening book.
Beyond an ongoing gardening-book project, the McElroy House is also addressing the needs of the community through a grant from the Arkansas River Valley Area Coordinating Committee to develop community gardens at the Freedom House, a drug-and-alcohol rehabilitation center that is overseen by ARVAC.
The McElroy House has coordinated workshops for Freedom House residents on rain barrels and vegetable gardening in containers, and will provide several other components that will be used in the future, said Audra Butler, chief operations officer for community programs for ARVAC.
“Meredith [Moats] is developing a gardening curriculum for Freedom House that will connect gardening with recovery,” Butler said. “We feel that this curriculum can also be used in daily life for anyone.”
The McElroy House is exploring another partnership with the Arkansas River Valley Regional Library for summer workshops on gardening or literacy, Williams said.
Suzanne Hodges with the All Saints Episcopal Church community garden sees direct benefits from the McElroy House’s community involvement.
“Meredith and the McElroy House are bringing people together to reclaim traditions that have sustained them for years, like gardening, family and local histories,” Hodges said. “It’s about regaining and revitalizing what you have, and there can’t be too many gardens in the world.”
A longer-term goal for the McElroy House is to have it open at least two days a week to have someone present for listening and assisting community members. But a roadblock to that goal was discovered. When applying for a permit through the city of Dardanelle, Moats and Williams learned they would be required to repave the current parking lot at the home because the previous park space didn’t meet the city’s code requirements.
A call to the University of Arkansas Community Design department resulted in a plan for a “green” parking lot, complete with stormwater runoff and collection. Moats said she hopes the money raised through the partnership with ARVAC will facilitate getting the center open soon.
Moats’ path to doing the work of a community folklorist has been circuitous but started with her roots in Yell County. An only child, she grew up with a strong sense of oral history across multiple generations. Members of her father’s family were loggers in Harkey Valley, while her mother’s family hailed from Carden Bottoms and the Boston Mountain region of the Ozarks.
After getting degrees in English and history, Moats worked in public radio for a couple of years at KUAF in Fayetteville.
“But I left radio, as the work required me to jump around a lot. I wound up going to graduate school at the University of Western Kentucky, as that university has a reputation for working with community stories and folklore,” Moats said.
Her work with historian and folklorist Michael Morrow on vernacular architecture, as well as documentary filmmaking, cemented her resolve to stick with community documenting and organizing.
“I worked on a project in Russellville, Kentucky, to do with a place called The Bottoms,” she said. “Many of the buildings were near ruin, but Michael helped turned them into multigenerational community centers. He gave his students a lot of room to create their own room and projects, so I decided to create a documentary film, Persistent Story.”
She also began thinking about creating a similar community center back in Arkansas. After finishing her master’s degree in May 2008, she soon returned home because of her mother’s diagnosis with stage 4 breast cancer. A few months after her mother’s death, Moats found out she was pregnant with twins.
“Everything I thought about what I knew about where I was headed was turned upside down,” she said.
After inheriting the house previously owned by her McElroy grandparents in Dardanelle, she decided she wanted to use that space to bring people together — “to honor both my mother and my grandparents,” she said. Recently while teaching an oral history and folklore class at Arkansas Tech, she advised her students to think about how family and community stories had affected them.
“Let’s listen to our neighbor’s story,” she said. “It’s not just older people. What are the younger people saying? We want to rethink what wealth looks like. We take people and community for granted. Basing everything off of getting more is not necessarily the answer. What are some long-term solutions? What are some solutions for our grandchildren?”
As part of the McElroy House’s plan to assist members of the community, the following workshops are scheduled: a gardening workshop May 12 with residents of Freedom House; and a plant-drawing workshop May 23 that is open to everyone, including kids of all ages. Participants need to bring their own art supplies. Drawings may be used in the McElroy House gardening book.