Roundtop Filling Station is one of only two properties in Sherwood honored with a listing on the National Register of Historic Places. It is also the sole Sherwood site on a less distinguished but more delightful and diverting registry.
Built in 1936, the former gas station is enshrined at Roadside America, the self-styled "online guide to offbeat attractions" across the United States. A virtual tour featuring some of the website's "weird attractions, hidden sights and unusual places" within an hour's drive of Little Rock makes for a refreshing elixir at a time when we all could use a chuckle or three.
Visitors to roadsideamerica.com will find 15 listings in Little Rock; 14 in Hot Springs; 5 in Conway; 2 each in North Little Rock, Bauxite and Pine Bluff; and a single one in Benton, Redfield, Sheridan, Stuttgart and Sherwood.
The turret-roofed Roundtop served as a setting in 2010 for The Last Ride, a movie that depicted the final days of legendary country singer Hank Williams. So decrepit a decade ago that it was listed in 2013 among Arkansas' most endangered historic places, the structure has been restored as a substation for the Sherwood Police Department.
A few of Roadside America's whimsical entries are well known but seldom visited. A prime example is the surviving fragment of the formation that a French explorer in the 18th century described as "Le Petite Rocher."
This unimposing hunk of stone sits below the Little Rock side of Junction Bridge, now a popular walkway. An attached plaque asserts that it is part of "the first rock seen by the French explorer Bernard de la Harpe on his voyage from the mouth of the Mississippi River up the Arkansas in 1722."
An arcane monument on Roadside America's list stands near the southeast corner of Little Rock's MacArthur Park. Likely noticed only by the occasional curious vagrant, it pays tribute to a notable event in the state's medical history:
"The first human dissection in Arkansas was made on this site in November 1874 by James H. Lenow MD, Little Rock, and Richard S. Vickery MD U.S. Army."
Former President and Gov. Bill Clinton shows up in less than flattering guise at one of his several Roadside America locations in Hot Springs, where the future 42nd president lived as a teenager.
The sight is a bas-relief wood billboard along Bathhouse Row featuring "a portrait of young William Jefferson Clinton (and his saxophone) wearing a dorky Hot Springs High School band uniform." Presumably, "dorky" rests in the eye of the beholder.
Hot Springs is also the venue for a huge white rooster perched atop a tall pole along Central Avenue. An attention-grabbing icon for Spa City Tattoo, the big bird has a tattoo that reads, "Don't Be a Chicken," along with a tattooed football helmet. On an afternoon last week, the inky shop had reopened and appeared to be doing good business.
In Redfield, south of Little Rock on the way to Pine Bluff, a building meant to resemble a gargantuan piece of fruit gets Roadside America's attention. The building's roof is shaped like half an orange and painted in the color of that citrus fruit. Its listing notes that the structure was originally named "The Big Orange" and later boosted to "Mammoth Orange Cafe."
The entrance to the Port of Pine Bluff, on that city's northeast edge, boasts a welcoming object that would be hard to miss. Perched atop two 30-foot-tall concrete pilings, it's a full-size tugboat painted patriotically in the colors of the American flag.
Benton is the setting for a Roadside America entry that is truly "unique." The Gann Museum is said to be — and most surely is — the only building anywhere in the world made of bauxite. As the website reports, "When the Benton patients of Dr. Dewell Gann couldn't afford to pay him in 1893, they went into the neighboring fields, sawed off pastel-colored blocks of the local rock and built him an office."
A fearsome mythical beast, the subject of a Conway entry, can be seen outside that city's high-school campus on Prince Street. It's a statue of a wampus cat, a figure in Southern folklore that does ferocious duty as the high school's mascot.
The Conway wampus cat is equipped with six paws, four of them up front. It is described with a touch of rhyming on the statue's sign: "A mythical cat-like creature with six legs: four for running at the speed of light, two for fighting with all its might."
Style on 05/26/2020