Bald Knob: The Railroad Sign That Became a Town

Bald Knob, Arkansas, started with a handmade sign. When the St. Louis, Iron Mountain, and Southern Railroad laid tracks through White County in the early eighteen seventies, a local settler named Benjamin Franklin Brown nailed a board beside the rails labeling the spot Bald Knob, after the treeless rise of ground nearby.

The name stuck. A post office opened in eighteen seventy-eight, and when residents incorporated the town in eighteen eighty-one, the mayor and the railroad depot arrived together. The line made Bald Knob a junction point, and for decades strawberries packed here onto refrigerator cars fed markets from Memphis to Chicago.

Union Pacific later designated it a Train Town USA, one of a select few communities singled out for railroad heritage.