If you are new to Bella Vista, you may wonder why so many of the streets appear to have British sounding names.
When John Cooper Sr. started developing the central and eastern parts of Bella Vista Village in the 1960s and '70s, his staff soon realized they had to come up with a large number of street names. To ease that task, they decided to use a British atlas.
One name they adopted, for example, is Grosvenor (pronounced "Grovener" with a silent "s") Road, which runs for 2.7 miles from Trafalgar near the east end of Lake Ann over to Looney Road, just short of Arkansas Highway 94. Bethnal Road overlaps it for a short distance, but Grosvenor is a rather isolated road with only three houses visible, all toward the east end near where a scenic median divides the road the last two-tenths of a mile.
If you have wondered about that name in particular, then your attention may have been caught recently by a newspaper headline that said, "Duke of Westminster, Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, dies age 64." The Duke died unexpectedly on Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2016.
As it turns out, there is a street in London, running from Hyde Park Corner down the west side of Buckingham Palace gardens, that is called Grosvenor Place. However, Grosvenor is more than just the name of a street. That street is named after a wealthy British family whose documented history goes back several centuries.
According to www.wikipedia.com, Sir Richard Grosvenor, the 1st Baronet, was an English politician who was born in 1585 to Richard Grosvenor of Eaton, and died in 1645. He was knighted in 1617 and created baronet in 1622. He was the grandfather of Sir Thomas Grosvenor, who lived from 1656 to 1700 and accrued much of the family's London wealth through his marriage to an heiress, Mary Davies, in 1677. Per the www.bbc.com website, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that she brought with her "the estates which would become the cornerstone of the family's later wealth." The estates were described as Ebury farm, east of Chelsea, and a large holding in central London. Today these are part of the wealthy Belgravia and Mayfair districts.
The Duke of Westminster Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, who died just recently, was eight generations down from Sir Thomas Grosvenor. The formal title was changed from Baronet to Marquess to Duke over the succeeding generations. Today, the Grosvenor Estate is listed as an international property portfolio, managing assets in more than 70 cities (see www.grosvenor.com) valued at over 11 billion pounds, a very wealthy family indeed.
So the next time you have the opportunity to travel "Grovener" Road in Bella Vista, remember the centuries of history connected to that name!
• • •
This article was written by Xyta Lucas, a volunteer with the Bella Vista Historical Society, which operates the Bella Vista Historical Museum. For more stories and displays about the history of Bella Vista, visit the museum at the corner of Highway 71 and Kingsland, next door to the American Legion. Hours are Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 4:00 p.m., with free admission. Additional information is available at www.bellavistamuseum.org and on the museum's Facebook page.
Community on 08/24/2016