Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Central City, AR

Central City is a small town in Sebastian County, located at the crossroads of Arkansas Highways 22 and 255 just south of Fort Smith, Arkansas's second-largest city, and is part of the Fort Smith metropolitan area.

The community borders the city of Lavaca to its east and Fort Chaffee to its south.

Central City was known as the Montrose Community in its earliest recorded history, and Bernard S. Sybert became its first postmaster in 1876.

In the 1830s, all of the "Five Civilized Tribes" — the Seminole, Muscogee Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Chickasaw — passed through the Central City area along the military road between Fort Gibson and Fort Smith during what became known as the Trail of Tears.

The Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad routed its line through the community and built a depot there in the 1870s, and by the early 1900s Central City had a cotton gin, a sawmill, and a grist mill.

By May 1883 the community had become known as Central City, with Benjamin F. Campbell serving as postmaster, and its two-story school building also doubled as a church.

In 1940, preparing for war in Europe, the U.S. government acquired 15,163 acres from 712 property owners in the area to build the military base that became Fort Chaffee, which opened in 1941.

Central City's schools, along with the Bugscuffle, Moore's Rock, and Arbuckle Island schools, had joined the Lavaca School System by the late 1930s.

Central City incorporated on January 24, 1974, after residents met and decided to incorporate because the neighboring city of Barling was annexing land eastward and they feared Barling would try to annex their community too.

Fort Chaffee was deactivated in 1997, and Central City's population has slowly declined since peaking at 531 in the 2000 census; the 2020 census counted 461 residents in the town's 2.22 square miles, compared with 216 households recorded back in 2000.