24/7 Biohazard and Crime Scene Cleanup in Hughes, AR

Hughes is a city in St. Francis County in the Arkansas Delta, the county's second-largest community, located about 37 miles west of Memphis, Tennessee.

The town was founded in 1913 as the Iron Mountain Railroad built its costly "mud line" from West Memphis to Marianna through the swamps and scrub prairies of the Delta.

Hughes was named for Robert Hughes, a native of Senatobia, Mississippi, who never moved to the town but bought a farm in the area in 1907 and donated land to the railroad.

The city of Hughes was incorporated on June 12, 1916.

Agriculture built Hughes: cotton was the historic staple, and by the twentieth century local harvests also included soybeans, corn, rice and timber.

The 2020 census counted 1,056 residents in Hughes, living in 467 households; the population has fallen by nearly half from its peak of 1,960 in 1960.

The Hughes Water Tower, built in 1936 by the Chicago Bridge and Iron Works with Public Works Administration funding, is the only surviving PWA-built water tower in St. Francis County and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Beginning in 1944, Hughes hosted a prisoner-of-war work camp where about 250 German prisoners performed agricultural work in place of local laborers serving in the military.

Blues guitarist Ernest Lawlars, known as "Little Son Joe" and the husband and musical partner of Memphis Minnie, was born in Hughes in 1900.

Cancer researcher Eddie Reed, the first African American scientist to serve as a branch chief at the National Cancer Institute and a member of the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame, was raised on a farm near Hughes.