PRAIRIE GROVE, Ark. — The list of things that Prairie Grove is known for isn’t long.

Every other year, the largest Civil War battle reenactment in Arkansas is held at Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park. In the late 90’s, an unexplained cluster of testicular cancer in the area gained attention from scientists and the news media.

The town of 5,700 is often described as quiet. But sometimes, a dial tone can be heard.

Prairie Grove is home to one of the last working phone booths in Arkansas. There are working pay phones in the state but working booths have almost entirely disappeared.

The aluminum box model outside a motel at the corner of East Douglas and Parker streets is on the National Register of Historic Places. It became operational in 1959. A tattered yellow phone book now hangs under the phone and explicit messages have been etched into a shelf next to it.

There’s a coin slot for nickels, dimes and quarters, but no money is needed. The phone is free and only makes local calls.

The phone booth was nearly destroyed in 2014, when a woman fell asleep at the wheel while driving through town overnight. She veered off the road, hit a telephone pole and upended the booth. Internet company PGTelco, which owns and operates the line, dragged the intact parts of the frame away while they thought about what to do with it.

The people of Prairie Grove, who seldom used the phone, immediately launched a campaign to repair the booth.

“Everyone just had a fit, like, ‘You got to put that back,’” Prarie Grove Battlefield State Park employee Cindy Whitehouse said. “So, they re-did it and put it back up, and that’s when it really became the National Registry.”

PGTelco repaired the booth and returned it to its position in front of the Colonial Motel.

“Myself, I don’t get the fascination with it,” PGTelco General Manager Rick Reed, who has been with the company for 34 years, said. “I didn’t know that it meant so much to the community until that happened.”

It was added to the National Register of Historic Places shortly afterward.

Across the street, the Civil War battle site and 900-acre state park lure in tourists, making one block of East Douglas Street an interesting stop for road-trippers and historians. Park interpreter Kylee Cole said she regularly sees people pull off the road into the motel parking lot behind the booth, take photos with it, and hit the road again.

“People come to see it actually a lot more than I expected,” Cole said.

The day before, visitors came into the museum asking where the booth was. Cole pointed out the window, directly across the street. She said she doesn’t feel slighted when people overlook the park.

“I think it’s cool from a historic preservation perspective,” Cole said. “It’s really neat that it’s another piece of Prairie Grove history that’s over there.”

Before everybody was carrying cell phones, Reed said, a lot of the phone booth’s usage came from park visitors. Now, it almost exclusively serves as a backdrop for photos. It hasn’t been lucrative for PGTelco for some time.