Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Bay, AR

Bay is a small city in Craighead County in northeast Arkansas, set in the flat farm country of the Arkansas Delta between Jonesboro and Trumann.

Long before Bay existed, a Mississippian-era society of the Lawhorn Phase lived here between about 1200 and 1400 AD, and two of their mounds still survive within the modern city.

The country around Bay was reshaped by the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812, which left behind the sunken lands and sand blows still characteristic of the St. Francis Lowlands east of town.

Bay took shape as a railroad village after the Frisco line, built as the Kansas City, Springfield and Memphis Railroad, came through in the early 1880s, and the town was incorporated on March 1, 1913.

The 2020 census counted 1,876 people in Bay, living in 762 households and 532 families.

Bay covers about 3.1 square miles of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, and the Census Bureau classified all of its residents as rural in 2020 even though the town belongs to the Jonesboro metropolitan area.

Bay has long been a farming community, though its population today skews younger than it once did, with a median age of 37.6 years in 2020 and many residents having moved in from larger cities.

The Bay School District, established in 1897, runs Bay Elementary School and Bay High School, home of the Yellowjackets, whose purple-and-gold teams are a center of town life.

An EF2 tornado struck Bay on April 27, 2011, during the historic Super Outbreak, tearing a 200-yard-wide path through the area with winds estimated at 115 miles per hour.

East of Bay along the St. Francis River, the St. Francis Sunken Lands Wildlife Management Area preserves bottomland hardwood forest of the kind that covered this region before row-crop farming.