Joiner: A Railroad Named Its Station After the Man Who Showed Hospitality

The town of Joiner, Arkansas has a disputed founding, but the naming is clear enough. Rufus Joiner, a businessman from Shelby County, Tennessee, had settled in Mississippi County by eighteen eighty. When executives from the St.

Louis and San Francisco Railway came through scouting a route, Joiner hosted them well. The executives remembered it. They built a depot nearby in nineteen oh three and named it after the Joiner family.

A post office followed in nineteen oh four. The town sits in the flat alluvial farmland of northeast Arkansas, where the Mississippi River has deposited silt for centuries to create some of the richest soil in America. The name has no connection to Columbus Marion Joiner, the famous Texas wildcatter called Dad Joiner who drilled the East Texas oil field in nineteen thirty.

This Joiner family just fed the railroad men a good meal at the right moment.