Traskwood, AR

Traskwood is a Saline County city in the Little Rock–North Little Rock–Conway metro, with 495 residents in the 2020 census. State Highway 229 and Union Pacific tracks run through the southernmost community in the county, midway between Benton and Malvern and several miles from Interstate 30. Glen Rose School District serves local children. The city has no commercial strip to rival its larger neighbors, but Landmark Missionary Baptist Church and the railroad corridor still give the small place fixed points on the map.

Traskwood grew around a railroad depot on the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway. The name reportedly combines the surnames of two railroad employees, Trask and Wood; a post office was already operating by 1874. Around 1920, the town had a depot, four general stores, a hotel, saloon, lumberyard, blacksmith shop, cotton gin, grist mill, churches, and school. Rail traffic later gave way to highways, and Traskwood reincorporated as a second-class city in 1968. Its story is an Arkansas rail town in miniature, with the tracks still running through a community built around them.