Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Crossett, AR

Crossett is a city in Ashley County in southeastern Arkansas, about nine miles north of the Louisiana border, and with 4,822 residents in the 2020 census it is the largest city in the county, though the county seat is Hamburg.

Crossett was founded in the late 1890s by three investors from Davenport, Iowa — Edward Savage Crossett, Dr. John Wenzel Watzek, and Charles Warner Gates — who organized the Crossett Lumber Company in 1899 and built a new town around its sawmill.

The townsite was settled in 1899 as a mill town and was incorporated on April 22, 1903.

Crossett bills itself as the 'Forestry Capital of the South,' a nickname earned because the Crossett Lumber Company, and later Georgia-Pacific, controlled some 800,000 acres of pine forest in southeast Arkansas and northeast Louisiana.

For decades Crossett was a classic company town: the Crossett Lumber Company owned essentially all of the town's homes and businesses until 1946, and one of its three-room mill houses is now preserved in the 110-acre Crossett City Park.

The Crossett Lumber Company built a paper mill in 1937, added kraft paper, food carton, and flakeboard plants by 1960, and merged into the Georgia-Pacific Company in 1962, whose complex in Crossett grew to more than 650 acres.

The Crossett Experimental Forest, established in 1934 about seven miles south of town and managed by the USDA Forest Service, is a nationally known long-term research forest for southern pine management, and Yale University once ran a forestry camp in the area.

Crossett's population peaked at 6,706 in 1980 and has declined with the timber industry, falling from 5,507 in 2010 to 4,822 in 2020; Georgia-Pacific's 2019 closure of its bleached board mill cost at least 530 jobs.

Four properties on Main Street in Crossett are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, reflecting the town's planned company-town origins.

North of Crossett, the 1,700-acre Lake Georgia-Pacific offers fishing from a park with RV and tent camping, while the roughly 65,000-acre Felsenthal National Wildlife Refuge lies about eight miles west of the city.