Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Elaine, AR

Elaine is a small city in Phillips County in the Arkansas Delta, covering only about half a square mile of Mississippi River lowland.

The town grew around a Missouri Pacific Railroad depot completed in 1906 on land assembled by investor Harry Kelley, and the depot was named Elaine, after one of Kelley's daughters, because the name Kelley was already taken by another stop.

Kelley and his partners laid out Elaine's lots in 1911, deliberately creating separate neighborhoods for white and Black families, and the young town soon had paved streets, electric lights, brick stores, and a brick schoolhouse.

Elaine was incorporated on April 23, 1919, the same year as the violence that would define its history.

On the night of September 30, 1919, a shooting at a Progressive Farmers and Household Union meeting at Hoop Spur, three miles north of Elaine, sparked the Elaine Massacre, in which white mobs and federal troops killed an estimated 237 Black residents, the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history.

In the aftermath, seventy-seven Black citizens were tried and sentenced while no whites were charged; twelve men sentenced to death were eventually freed after appeals supported by the NAACP and Little Rock attorney Scipio Africanus Jones.

The Elaine Legacy Center opened in February 2017 to memorialize the victims of the massacre and the local struggle for civil rights, and the massacre's centennial in 2019 drew national attention to the town.

Timber companies such as the Howe Lumber Company and the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company were major early employers in Elaine, alongside plantations cleared from the surrounding swampland.

The Flood of 1927 forced the Bank of Elaine to close, and the town had no bank again until the Delta State Bank opened in 1948.

Elaine's population peaked at 1,210 in 1970 and declined with Delta farm mechanization; the 2020 census counted 509 residents, about 71 percent of them Black or African American.