For Little Rock Public Radio, this is Dan Boice, with Naming Arkansas and Post Office names.
While the clerks of the U.S. Postal Service struggled – sometimes unsuccessfully – to decipher the pen-and-ink applications for new post offices, in some cases, they simply gave the townspeople exactly what they asked for.
One of the most famous of these post offices that closed in 1967 was in Polk County. In 1887, as the town leaders struggled to complete the official form, says one story, they took literally the instruction on the form to “write in ink,” and so they did. Wrote in Ink for the proposed name, which the post office approved.
There are variations of this story, including a school teacher conducting a meeting in which residents were asked to write down possible names, and she instructed them to “write in ink,” and so they all did. A third version has the school teacher submitting the name Inky, which the postal service shortened to Ink.
In any case, the town of Ink for eighty years proved the power of the pen!
For the University of Arkansas at Monticello, this is Dan Boice