Roundtop Filling Station: Six Brands, One Mushroom
Near Little Rock, Arkansas
On a stretch of old United States Highway Sixty-Seven in Sherwood, Arkansas, there is a gas station shaped like a mushroom. Built in nineteen thirty-six for the Pierce Oil Company, a descendant of Rockefeller's broken-up Standard Oil, the octagonal stucco building has a double-hipped turret roof that flares out at the edges, giving it the look of novelty architecture that was fashionable among oil companies trying to stand out on the highway. Architect Frank Carmean designed it for the Justin Matthews Company, and brothers C.
C. and Powderley Eubanks built it. W.
D. Happy Williford ran the station from day one, eventually buying it in the nineteen fifties, after Sinclair absorbed Pierce Oil around nineteen forty. Over the next four decades the station passed through Phillips Sixty-Six, DX, and finally Sunoco branding before Williford retired and closed it in nineteen eighty-one.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand eight, it is the only surviving example of this type of filling station in Arkansas.
