Atkins, Arkansas, Pickle City USA

Atkins began in the early eighteen seventies when rail workers laying track from Fort Smith toward Little Rock set up camp here, and a town grew up around the depot. For most of its life it was a quiet Arkansas River Valley farming community, but in nineteen forty-six a group of local citizens had an unusual idea: they raised seventeen thousand dollars to lure a Chicago pickle company, the Goldsmith Pickle Company, to open a plant in town. The plant opened on July seventeenth, nineteen forty-six, employed about a hundred people, and over the decades grew into a Dean Foods operation producing more than forty million dollars in sales before closing in two thousand two. The Atkins Pickle Company left behind a festival, Picklefest, held every spring since nineteen ninety-two, and the proud nickname Pickle City USA.