Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Gosnell, AR

Gosnell is a first-class city in northern Mississippi County in northeastern Arkansas, a few miles south of the Missouri Bootheel, and it functions mainly as a bedroom community for nearby Blytheville.

The city is named for Lemuel Ward Gosnell, a dentist and pioneer farmer who purchased much of the land between Blytheville and Big Lake in the late 1800s.

As late as 1902 the settlement was known as Chickasawba, and neighbors also called it Stuff Town, apparently for the store near an Indigenous mound where farm families bought whatever goods they could not raise themselves.

A fifteen-foot mound built during the Mississippian Period (AD 900–1600) stands about two miles southeast of Gosnell, and the Eaker archaeological site along Pemiscot Bayou lies between Gosnell and Blytheville.

Big Lake, west of Gosnell, served as a boat transportation route linking the settlement to larger cities in Arkansas, Missouri, and Tennessee in the days before automobiles and railroads, and supported a thriving commercial hunting and fishing trade.

The Blytheville Army Air Field was activated on June 10, 1942, and although the base sat within Blytheville's city limits, the family housing built there in the 1950s lay inside the Gosnell school district, so military children were bused to Gosnell schools.

The installation was renamed Eaker Air Force Base in 1988 in honor of Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, commander of the Eighth Air Force in World War II, and when the base closed in 1992 the Gosnell school system lost half of its enrollment.

Gosnell was incorporated as a first-class city on March 12, 1968, and its first mayor after incorporation was Andy Bevill.

The 2020 census counted 2,910 residents in Gosnell, down from 3,548 in 2010 and a peak of 3,968 in 2000, a decline tied to the air base closure.

The 2010 census recorded 3,548 people living in 1,387 households in Gosnell.