Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Altheimer, AR

Altheimer is a second-class city in Jefferson County, located roughly halfway between Pine Bluff and Stuttgart, and it is part of the Pine Bluff metropolitan area.

The city was founded as a railroad town in the 1880s and was named for brothers Joseph and Louis Altheimer, Pine Bluff merchants who encouraged the building of the railroad.

Louis Altheimer was born in Germany in 1850 and, inspired by German adventurer Frederick Gerstacker's stories of Arkansas's rich natural resources, left for America as a teenager and eventually settled in Pine Bluff, bringing his brother Joseph with him.

The Altheimer brothers had ties to the St. Louis Southwestern Railway, known as the Cotton Belt, and acquired roughly 12,000 acres of Jefferson County land that they cleared for cotton fields; the railway station at the center of that land was named for them.

The site of Altheimer was originally flood-prone forestland, and its first resident, Dr. Samuel Johnson Jones, arrived from Mississippi in 1857 and cleared 500 acres of timberland.

Altheimer quickly became a center for shipping cotton, surpassing older cities in eastern Arkansas, and around 1900 Jacob Cohn opened the city's first grocery store.

The Arkansas River flooded in 1904, ruining that year's cotton crop around Altheimer.

Although the town grew rapidly as a railroad and cotton center, it was not incorporated until June 9, 1919.

Altheimer's population peaked at 1,231 in the 1980 census, but the 2020 census counted just 696 residents in the city's 2.05 square miles — down from 984 in 2010 and 1,192 people in 394 households in 2000.

Joseph Altheimer's son Benjamin became a successful Chicago attorney, founding the prominent law firm that became Altheimer & Gray and twice serving as president of Chicago's Iroquois Club, while still owning some 15,000 acres of Arkansas land.