Biohazard Cleanup Near South DeWitt DeWitt, AR

DeWitt is a city in Arkansas County in southeastern Arkansas, and it serves as the county seat of the county's southern district — Arkansas County is one of the few Arkansas counties with two county seats, the other being Stuttgart in the northern district.

DeWitt was founded on February 19, 1853, as a new, more centrally located county seat to replace Arkansas Post; it was platted in 1854 and incorporated on January 26, 1876.

The town famously got its name out of a hat: three men each submitted a name on a slip of paper, and the one drawn honored DeWitt Clinton, the former governor of New York, at the suggestion of county surveyor Adam McCool.

The 2020 census counted 3,056 residents in DeWitt, living in 1,231 households, which makes it the second-largest city in Arkansas County.

DeWitt sits in the middle of the Arkansas Grand Prairie, the flat grassland region at the heart of the state's rice industry, and local mills — including Cormier Rice Mill and subsidiaries of Riceland Foods and Producers Rice Mill — process the surrounding harvest.

In the 1930s, DeWitt's two large rice mills handled about one-third of Arkansas's entire rice crop.

The flooded rice fields around DeWitt lie on the Mississippi Flyway and draw huge numbers of ducks and geese, making duck hunting season, from November to January, one of the city's biggest annual draws.

DeWitt is the center of the DeWitt School District, which is the largest school district in Arkansas by land area and absorbed the Gillett and Humphrey districts in 2005; its high school teams are the Dragons.

The city is home to the DeWitt campus of Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas, which began in the 1960s as the Rice Belt Vocational-Technical Institute and launched an agriculture program in 2005 aimed at making it the state's premier two-year college in the field.

The Arkansas County Fair has been held at the Arkansas County Fairgrounds in DeWitt every year since 1938, in mid-September.