Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Manila, AR

Manila is a city in northwestern Mississippi County, Arkansas, in the northeastern Arkansas Delta, about nine miles south of the Missouri state line.

Manila's origins trace to a herdsman's camp established by John U. Needham in 1868, and by the late 1890s a community called Cinda — named after an early postmaster's sister — had developed in the area.

The community incorporated on July 3, 1901, choosing the name Manila to honor Commodore George Dewey's 1898 victory at the Battle of Manila Bay in the Spanish-American War.

The 2020 census counted 3,682 people in Manila living in 1,410 households, up from 3,342 in 2010.

Unlike many Mississippi County towns, Manila has kept growing in recent decades, in part as residents relocated there from nearby Blytheville and Osceola.

The Manila Depot, built in 1910 by the Jonesboro, Lake City and Eastern Railroad, now serves as a museum and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Manila was the hometown of Herman Davis, a celebrated World War I sniper; a memorial to him was established in the city in 1925 and designated Herman Davis State Park in 1953.

The Big Lake National Wildlife Refuge, preserving bottomland hardwood forest typical of the Delta before row-crop development, lies just east of Manila.

Manila sits on Buffalo Island amid some of the richest farmland in Arkansas; Big Lake itself was formed by the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–12.

Manila's levees broke in the devastating floods of 1927 and 1937 before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the present levee system around Big Lake in 1938.