Perrytown, Arkansas

Just off Highway Sixty-Seven a few miles northeast of Hope sits Perrytown, and it owes its existence to one man's truck stop. In the late nineteen fifties, a local businessman named Perry Campbell opened a fuel stop beside the highway, then added a garage, a restaurant, and a motel he called Perry's Congress Motel. Within eight years the cluster had grown into a real small town, complete with a cabinet shop, a grocery, a gift shop, greenhouses, and two watermelon stands.

In nineteen sixty-three, residents reportedly voted to incorporate so they could collect state sales and gasoline tax revenue to pay for road repairs. They named the new town Perrytown in Campbell's honor. That is Perrytown: a highway stop that quietly voted itself into existence.