Beatles Park and the Abbey Road Sculpture, Walnut Ridge, Arkansas

Beatles Park in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, holds The British Invasion of the Rock 'n' Roll Highway, a 10-by-20-foot Abbey Road scene by local metalworker Danny West. It was unveiled on 18 September 2011, 47 years after the Beatles landed at the town's airport on their way to a ranch in Missouri. The band never played here.

A plane change in the middle of the 1964 tour

On 18 September 1964 the Beatles played Dallas. Rather than fly straight on, they took a weekend off at a ranch near Alton, Missouri, owned by Reed Pigman, whose company American Flyers Airlines chartered their tour aircraft. Walnut Ridge was picked for the transfer because its runway, built for Second World War pilot training, could take the tour airliner.

The band landed that night. Jack Allison, who ran the Polar Freeze restaurant, heard a large jet coming in and sent three teenagers out to the airport to see what it was. They found the Beatles walking from the plane. News travelled through town over the weekend, and on Sunday 20 September a crowd waited at the airport for the return trip. Lennon and Starr came back in a small plane, McCartney and Harrison by road in a Suburban, and all four boarded for New York and the final concert of the tour.

The details vary between accounts. The marker in the park puts the landing on Friday evening, while the Encyclopedia of Arkansas says just after midnight. The crowd on Sunday is given as 200 to 300, several hundred, or more than 300, and the vehicle as a GMC or a 1962 Chevrolet.

The sculpture

Danny West of Iron Mountain Metal Works spent more than 500 hours engraving the Abbey Road street scene by hand across five quarter-inch aluminium sheets. In front stand life-size silhouettes of the four Beatles cut from heavy carbon steel plate. The whole piece is 10 feet high and 20 feet wide, and its title links the town to US Highway 67, promoted locally as the Rock 'n' Roll Highway.

West hid more than 30 references to Beatles song and album titles in the engraving, along with a few details that belong to Walnut Ridge. A tablet next to the sculpture lists them so visitors can search. Because the plates are engraved rather than painted, some details appear only as the light shifts during the day or under the lights after dark.

It was unveiled on 18 September 2011, after an afternoon set by the tribute band Liverpool Legends. That day became the first Beatles at the Ridge festival, now held each September.

The rest of the Beatles trail in town

The block of Second Street beside the park was renamed Abbey Road. Next to the sculpture, the When The Beatles Came to Town marker reproduces Pete Snapp's colour snapshots of the band leaving in 1964. A guitar-shaped path, the Guitar Walk, was added in Cavanaugh Park in 2012 for musicians from the region.

For another American town that remembers a brief Beatle visit, see the First Beatle in America marker in Benton, Illinois.