October 5, 2011

After World War II, the United States organized a relief operation for Europeans; Arkansas provided five boxcars of food. In 1948, France, in gratitude, organized a program known as the Merci Train. The next year, forty-nine boxcars, each holding 500 to 600 gifts, were delivered to the forty-eight states; the District of Columbia and the territory of Hawaii shared the last. After Arkansas’s boxcar was empty, it was donated to the Forty & Eight Society, a veterans’ organization, and put on display at the American Legion post in Helena (Phillips County).