Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Bonanza, AR

Bonanza is a city in Sebastian County, part of the Fort Smith metropolitan area, that began as a coal-mining company town of the Central Coal and Coke Company.

Coal was discovered near the Arkansas-Oklahoma line about twelve miles southeast of Fort Smith, and in 1896 the Central Coal and Coke Company built into the area with the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway and structured Bonanza as its company town.

The company's three producing mines defined the town: Mine No. 12 employed 144 workers, Mine No. 20 employed 185, and Mine No. 26 employed 76, after the first shaft, Mine No. 10, proved disappointing.

Mine superintendent C. C. Woodson filed the incorporation petition, and Bonanza was chartered on November 26, 1898.

Bonanza's population peaked at 906 in the 1900 census; the 2020 census counted 587 residents, after decades of decline that began as the mines closed, No. 20 in 1907 and No. 26 in 1919.

When Central Coal and Coke ended operations in Bonanza, it dismantled the company houses and moved them to another of its mining towns in Oklahoma.

In the spring of 1904 Bonanza was the scene of the Bonanza Race War, days of violence in which white residents terrorized and expelled the town's Black miners and their families; the Encyclopedia of Arkansas describes the Bonanza that resulted as a sundown town.

An explosion at Bonanza's Mine No. 20 in November 1903 killed thirteen men, according to federal coal-fatality records of the era.

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas describes modern Bonanza as a small bedroom community for nearby Fort Smith, the industry that created it having vanished.

Bonanza's mining-era population included European immigrants served by separate Catholic churches for Irish and Italian congregations.