Atlanta, Illinois: Paul Bunyan Holds a Hot Dog Here

Atlanta, Illinois, is a small city in Logan County along the Route Sixty-Six alignment between Bloomington and Springfield, best known today for a fiberglass muffler-man statue outside a gas station on the old highway. The statue, originally designed as a promotional giant for Bunyon's Restaurant in nearby Cicero, was moved to Atlanta in two thousand three and refitted to hold a giant hot dog. It is exactly the kind of roadside object that Route Sixty-Six restoration culture loves: kitschy, large, and specific.

Atlanta itself was platted in eighteen fifty-three and named for the railroad boom town in Georgia after the first choice, Xenia, turned out to be taken. It grew, modestly. The town has a working clock tower and a library housed in an octagonal building from nineteen oh eight that is one of a small number of octagonal public libraries surviving in Illinois.