"Alice" was restaurant owner Alice M. Brock, who with husband Ray Brock lived in a former church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where the song's Thanksgiving dinners were actually held. She was a painter and designer, while Ray was an architect and woodworker. Both worked at a nearby private academy, the music- and art-oriented Stockbridge School, from which Guthrie (then of the Queens, New York City neighborhood of Howard Beach) had graduated.

Alice's restaurant (formally known as the "Back Room Rest", named for its location down an alley behind a grocery store at 40 Main Street in Stockbridge, Massachusetts) was roughly six miles from the church — though true to the song, it was "just a half-a-mile from the railroad track". Formerly Maluphy's Restaurant, it ran the length of the building from front to back along the side alley. Owned by Alice for only a year before she and Ray divorced, it was, as of 2005, Theresa's Stockbridge Cafe, where a hand-painted sign indicates its former identity. The building's front as of 2006 is The Main Street Cafe.

The song and a subsequent movie made both Alice and Stockbridge police chief William Obanhein ("Officer Obie"), who arrested Guthrie, marginally famous. Obanhein, in addition, had previously posed twice for the famed local artist Norman Rockwell ("The Runaway," 1958), and appeared in print advertisements for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance and for Goodwill Industries.