Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Clarendon, AR

Clarendon is a city in the Arkansas Delta and the county seat of Monroe County, built on the White River at the mouth of the Cache River.

French hunters and trappers had built cabins at the site by about 1799, when the settlement was known as Mouth of the Cache; it was renamed Clarendon in 1824 in honor of the Earl of Clarendon.

The Military Road from Memphis to Little Rock, built between 1826 and 1828, crossed the White River by ferry at Clarendon, making the town a stagecoach terminus — and a crossing used by Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Cherokee parties during the forced removals known as the Trail of Tears.

Clarendon became the Monroe County seat in 1857 and was first incorporated on February 8, 1859.

During the Civil War, Union forces burned Clarendon in 1864 in retaliation for the Confederate sinking of the gunboat USS Queen City; the town's charter was dissolved in 1884, and Clarendon was reincorporated in 1898.

The Monroe County Courthouse in Clarendon, designed by noted Arkansas architect Charles L. Thompson and built in 1911, still anchors the downtown.

In the early 1900s, Clarendon turned the river's freshwater mussels into industry, cutting buttons from their shells, trading in freshwater pearls at the Clarendon Pearl Market, and hosting the Moss Brothers Bat Company, which supplied baseball bats to major league players.

The Great Flood of 1927 devastated Clarendon: the main levee held until the White River reached 38.5 feet — eight and a half feet above flood stage — before the river crested at 44 feet and flooded buildings up to their second floors.

A new levee completed in 1937 lessened, but did not eliminate, the White River flooding threat that has shaped Clarendon's history.

The 2020 census counted 1,526 residents in Clarendon, living in 688 households, down from a peak of 2,638 in 1920.