Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Keo, AR

Keo is a small town in southern Lonoke County, Arkansas, located on U.S. Highway 165 between Scott and England, about 24 miles southeast of Little Rock.

The town grew out of a settlement called Cobb Settlement or Cobbs, named for Lafayette Cobb, who settled in Lonoke County in 1873 and served as its first postmaster.

The present townsite was called Dunham Station until the railroad arrived in 1887; it was renamed Keo in honor of Keo Dooley, daughter of prominent landowner Judge P. C. Dooley, and its post office opened in 1889.

Keo was incorporated on March 17, 1916, the same year the rival Cobb Settlement post office closed, confirming Keo's place on the railroad as the surviving community.

Keo's population peaked at 325 in the 1920 census; the 2020 census counted 207 residents, down from 256 in 2010, spread across about 4.9 square miles of Delta farmland.

Keo was a cotton town: two cotton gin complexes - the Morris gin on the north and the Cobb gin on the south - anchored the ends of Main Street, and the Cobb gin continued operating into the twenty-first century before closing in 2008.

The Keo Commercial Historic District, comprising thirty-five structures along Main Street, was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 15, 2011, honoring the town's cotton and rice farming heritage.

The old Morris Cotton Gin, vacant after closing around 1970, was reborn in the late 1990s as Morris Antiques, an antique store of roughly 60,000 square feet that draws shoppers from across the region.

Charlotte's Eats and Sweets, opened by Charlotte Bowles in 1992, became a nationally known small-town restaurant famous for its pies, drawing lunchtime visitors from Little Rock and beyond.

The 2007 film Shotgun Stories, written and directed by Little Rock native Jeff Nichols, was partly filmed in the Keo area in 2005.