Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Fargo, AR

Fargo is an incorporated town in northern Monroe County, Arkansas, located on U.S. Highway 49 about four miles north of Brinkley and just north of Interstate 40, which passes about three miles to the south.

Fargo began at a railroad crossing: in 1898 the St. Louis Southwestern Railway (the Cotton Belt) and the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad crossed at the site, a post office named Fargo was established that year, and the two railroads built a joint depot there in 1911.

According to local history recorded by the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, the name Fargo was suggested by a conductor on the Cotton Belt Railroad.

The town was platted in 1911 on 40 acres of farmland owned by Leroy Washington Mahon, a man born into slavery in South Carolina in 1861 who had moved to Monroe County in 1888, making Fargo a 'freedmen's town' where Black families bought lots and built homes.

Fargo is best known for the Fargo Agricultural School, founded in 1919 by Floyd B. Brown, a graduate of Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute who famously arrived in town with just $2.85 to his name.

The school opened on January 1, 1920, with one teacher, Ruth Mahon, and fifteen students, and was modeled on Tuskegee, combining academic subjects such as English, mathematics, and science with vocational training in carpentry, plumbing, farming, sewing, and food preparation.

Unlike similar Arkansas schools of its era, the Fargo Agricultural School was privately owned and supported by no religious organization, and it brought Fargo graveled roads, electricity, and telephone service, along with an annual farmers' conference that drew hundreds of visitors.

Brown sold the campus to the State of Arkansas in 1949, and it became the Fargo Training School for Negro Girls; amid desegregation of the state training-school system, the Fargo school was closed in 1968 and its students were transferred to Alexander.

The Fargo Training School Historic District, made up of campus buildings constructed between 1955 and 1960 plus an older gymnasium billed as the first gymnasium for Black students in eastern Arkansas, was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 27, 2010.

Fargo did not incorporate until January 6, 1987, when its remaining residents voted to form a town so it could obtain state and federal money for roads and a water system; its post office had already closed in 1976.