Alma, Arkansas
Near Fort Smith, Arkansas
Alma, Arkansas, sits in the Arkansas River Valley at the foot of the Ozark Mountains, where Crawford County farmland gives way to the Boston Mountain foothills. The town was platted in eighteen seventy-four when the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad pushed through, and it takes its name from a female given name common among early settler families, though the precise origin is disputed. What is not disputed is its identity: Alma calls itself the Spinach Capital of the World, a claim rooted in the Allen Canning Company, whose plant processed so much canned spinach from local fields in the mid-twentieth century that the town erected a statue of Popeye.
The statue still stands near City Hall. Population today hovers around six thousand, and Interstate Forty passes just north of the old railroad townsite.
