Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Burdette, AR

Burdette is an incorporated town in Mississippi County, Arkansas — not an unincorporated place — having been incorporated on May 10, 1905, as a company town by workers of the Three States Lumber Company of Wisconsin.

The town is named after Alfred Burdette Wolverton, who in the early 1900s was one of the first lumbermen to settle in the area.

Before the lumber company arrived, the Burdette area was swampland considered uninhabitable; the Three States Lumber Company finished construction of its first sawmill there in June 1906.

Burdette sits nine miles south of Blytheville on State Highway 148, just off U.S. Highway 61, the route known as the Great River Road.

By 1922 the company town had a hotel, wooden sidewalks, a power plant, a cooperage company, two separate schools, a large park with a baseball diamond, an open-air theater, a community canning kitchen, a post office, and an ice cream parlor.

The Blytheville, Burdette, and Mississippi River Railroad was incorporated in 1906 with a line from the Burdette mill to Wolverton Landing on the Mississippi River.

Daniel Tucker was the first African American known to own land in Burdette, and his land later became known as Tuckertown, the Black portion of the town; Tucker was one of the original signers of the 1905 petition to incorporate Burdette Township.

The 2,200-acre Burdette Plantation became a testing ground for agricultural research by the University of Arkansas, the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture beginning in 1923, and cotton varieties developed there included Burdette Express, Burdette Lone Star, Burdette Trice, Burdette Acala, and Burdette Delfos.

Burdette had a population of 140 at the 2020 census, down from 191 in 2010, and covers just 0.74 square miles of land.

The Burdette School Complex Historic District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places; Burdette's schools consolidated with the Blytheville School District in the early 1990s and were closed in 2001, and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas notes the community today has no churches or businesses.