“On Fields Far Away: Our Community During the Great War,” is a new exhibit at Rogers Historical Museum. (Special to the Democrat-Gazette / MARCIA SCHNEDLER )

ROGERS -- The centennial of an important historical event is prime fodder for museum curators. That accounts for this month's opening at Rogers Historical Museum of "On Fields Far Away: Our Community During the Great War."

The United States entered World War I on April 6, 1917, inspiring an outburst of patriotism in Arkansas and across the nation. One of every eight Arkansans -- almost every man of military age -- registered for the draft by war's end on Nov. 11, 1918. Nearly 72,000 served in the eventually victorious fighting in France, with 2,183 dying (more than half from influenza and other illnesses).

The special exhibit, running through Sept. 23, addresses the war's impact in Benton County. It's a microcosm of how Americans responded to what was sometimes called (with unintended irony) the War to End All Wars.

A main character in the display is Vera Key, born in War Eagle in 1893. She sailed to France with Base Hospital 60 of the Army Nurse Corps in 1918 and returned to Arkansas in 1920 with a detailed diary and a cache of photographs she'd taken. In 1954, she helped found the Benton County Historical Society. The 5,600-square-foot Key Wing of Rogers Historical Museum is named for her.

A cousin, Carl Key, is also honored in "On Fields Far Away." Wounded in a German gas attack only weeks before the war ended, he was later sent to a veterans hospital in Hot Springs. He died there in 1919, believed to have been the war's last fatality from Benton County.

Permanent exhibits at the award-winning museum also take visitors back a century (sometimes farther) to everyday life in Northwest Arkansas. The First Street display features facades of a barber shop, a general store and a bank from the early 20th century. The Attic, an inviting hands-on area for children, evokes a trip to grandmother's house.

Standing near the entrance to the exhibit area is the former Rogers City Jail, a mail-order structure from 1894 with black bars and two cells. A sign explains that the term for such local lockups back then was "calaboose." Another sign offers a whimsical invitation: "We'd be happy to throw you in jail. Just turn yourself in to any staff member."

Opened in 1975 in a downtown bank building, the museum moved in 1982 into Hawkins House, a five-room brick house dating to 1895. The Key Wing was added in 1987, and sizable further expansion is in the works.

Museum staff members or volunteers conduct guided tours of Hawkins House, decorated and furnished as it would have been after being built in 1895 for a local businessman. He soon decided that the house was too small for his family and sold it for $500 in 1900 to Francis Cunningham Hawkins, proprietor of a livery store. To 21st-century eyes, the wallpaper is riotously colorful.

Three generations of the Hawkins family lived in the house until 1979. It was then sold to the city of Rogers and remains open as "a faithful re-creation of a middle-class home in small-town America at the turn of the [20th] century."

It also embodies the home front that doughboys from Benton County and across the land were fighting to preserve from so far away.

Rogers Historical Museum, 322 S. Second St., Rogers, is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday. Admission is free, with donations welcome. For details, visit rogershistoricalmuseum.org or call (479) 621-1154.

Weekend on 01/19/2017