By Andy Ostmeyer

aostmeyer@joplinglobe.com

PEA RIDGE, Ark. — Nearly 50 years after two great armies collided here, Asa Payne, a veteran of the First Missouri Confederate Brigade, returned to the scene of so much slaughter he had witnessed in his youth. He wandered around the ridges and old fields, beneath a full moon he described as a “copper disk.”

He stayed that night on the old battlefield, and noted that it was eerily quiet, unlike in 1862. “The booming of the cannon and the wails of the wounded were hushed forever,” he wrote.

Still, Payne couldn’t help but remark on how little the place had changed when he returned in 1911, according to an account written by two historians of the battle, William Shea and Earl Hess.

Trees, like many a veteran, still carried the scars of musket balls and an artillery barrage that, up to that time, was the greatest ever seen on the continent, the historians wrote. Relic hunters regularly hit paydirt when scouring the field.

Returning today, Payne might be surprised at what he would recognize. Pea Ridge National Military Park is known today for being one of the most intact and authentic battlefields from the Civil War.

But, on the eve of the 150th anniversary of the battle, there’s a new campaign under way — to complete as much as possible of the restoration of the site Payne and others couldn’t forget.

Using letters, diaries, military maps, land-office notes, surveys and other and records, park officials are cutting out trees that weren’t there in 1862, and replanting red and white oaks in areas that were forested.

“We got to remove a lot of cedar trees,” Chief Ranger Steve Black said last week of the 4,300-acre unit of the National Park Service. “We have 1,000 acres of cedar here.”

An apple orchard was planted last year near Elkhorn Tavern; records indicate an orchard was there in 1862. Hundreds of peach trees also have been planted on the old G.W. Ford farm; records indicate there were 1,500 peach trees on the farm in 1862.

Black said volunteers and others have put up more than 17 miles of “worm rail” fence to help mark the hardscrabble farms and houses that were there when the armies met in March of 1862 for one of the largest Civil War battles west of the Mississippi.