Perryville calling: pack the sequins, leave the dog
PERRYVILLE, Ark. — Every October a town of about fifteen hundred people remembers that it is the unofficial capital of taking goats seriously and not seriously at the same time.
This year the date is Saturday, October 3, 2026, ten to four, Perryville Park. Admission is free. Dogs are not invited. Goats, however, are the point.
The Arkansas Goat Festival is the rare civic event invented because two people talking about “Saturdays on the Square” decided a goat parade would be funnier than another raffle. That was 2016. A decade later you get a costume contest, an Au Naturale parade, soap-making, live music on two stages, something in the neighborhood of 140 vendors, a kid zone, and the event Nanny Belle was born to cover: Nannies at Night, the goat lingerie show.
Professor Gruff asked whether “lingerie” was too much for a family paper. Nanny Belle asked Professor Gruff whether he had ever seen a Nigerian Dwarf in a silk robe. The motion failed.
Perryville also maintains a municipal goat park — the only one of its kind in the United States, if you believe the local boast, and we choose to believe it. You may take your goat there to roam at leisure, which is a sentence that should be on every chamber-of-commerce brochure in the hills and is on almost none.
The Arkatype Farms crew will attend in a professional capacity, which means:
- Scoop will attempt to interview a goat in a superhero cape and will be ignored.
- Inkhorn will write 800 words on the cultural history of the goatee contest and then delete 600 of them.
- Button will get lost in the kid zone and emerge with three stickers and a theory of vendor funnel cakes.
- Nanny Belle will judge nothing officially and everything privately.
- Professor Gruff will stand under a shade tree, eat something fried, and mutter that Sturgis has motorcycles but Perryville has purpose.
Founder-era wisdom still holds: if you have a motorcycle you go to Sturgis; if you have a goat you go to Perryville.
Mark the calendar. Polish the harness. If you plan to enter the costume class, remember that “funny” beats “expensive,” and “the goat can still walk” beats both.
See you in the park. Leave the dog at home. Bring the sequins.