Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Diaz, AR

Diaz is a city in Jackson County in northeastern Arkansas, located just north of Newport, the county seat, about halfway between Jacksonport State Park and the Newport Municipal Airport.

The community began as farmland known locally as Shiloh, first cleared and settled by Elijah Blansett and George Sink shortly before the Civil War.

Diaz was created by the railroad industry in the late nineteenth century: in 1882, Caroline Cox sold fifteen acres of family land to the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway for a station.

The station was named for Joseph Dyas, a Jackson County resident and one of the railroad's first conductors, and the spelling was later altered to Diaz for reasons that were never recorded.

Robert West moved his store from Jacksonport to Diaz and built the town's first cotton gin in 1891, replacing it with a new gin in 1894 after the first was destroyed by fire.

The city of Diaz was platted in 1901, when it already had about 300 residents, several grocery and mercantile stores, a livery stable, a railroad depot, and two churches.

A post office was established in Diaz in 1916, and by 1920 the town supported two newspapers, the Times and the Weekly Enterprise.

Diaz remained unincorporated until November 19, 1956, when its citizens elected Sarah Emma West Hurley as their first mayor; born in 1878, she was proudly advertised as the 'oldest woman mayor in Arkansas' and served until her death in 1963.

Annexations in the 1970s doubled Diaz's acreage and pushed its population past 1,000 residents, and a municipal building was dedicated in 1973.

The 2020 census counted 1,224 residents in Diaz, down from 1,318 in 2010, across an area of about 5.97 square miles.