Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in Birdsong, AR

Birdsong is a tiny incorporated town in the extreme southwestern corner of Mississippi County, in the Mississippi River Delta of northeastern Arkansas.

The town site began as swampland at 220 feet above sea level that stayed flooded for much of the year; only after drainage districts were organized in 1907 and 1916 were some 26,000 surrounding acres made suitable for habitation.

The village took shape around 1928 as the terminus of a short-line railroad serving the Chapman and Dewey Lumber Company's clear-cutting operations, and it was initially named Hubbard.

Birdsong's post office had earlier opened under the name Cuble, quickly changed to Bubble in 1907, and became Birdsong in 1931 — the origin of all three names has been lost to history.

Most of Birdsong's early settlers were Black tenant farmers and sharecroppers who came to work the Delta cotton land.

Birdsong gained national attention on March 15, 1935, when about 500 members of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union gathered to hear Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas speak, and armed planters and lawmen broke up the crowd and drove Thomas out of town at gunpoint.

A roughly two-and-a-half-month reign of terror followed the 1935 meeting, with night riders, burned houses, and shots fired into the homes of union supporters around Birdsong.

The community's two churches — African Methodist Episcopal and Baptist — and its now-closed school stood on land donated by Mamma Lee Cummings.

Birdsong incorporated on May 31, 1984, in an effort led by home economist Callie Perry to raise money to build a municipal water and sewer system.

The first census to count Birdsong, in 1990, found 104 people, but the population fell to 40 in 2000, 41 in 2010, and just 32 in 2020, in a town of only 0.20 square miles that today has no businesses.