Blood & Biohazard Cleanup Near South Maynard Maynard, AR

Maynard is a town in northern Randolph County, Arkansas, at the intersection of State Highways 115 and 328 in the foothills of the Ozarks.

The town traces its founding to John Maynard, a former Confederate Army captain who moved to Arkansas in 1872, opened a dry goods store, and farmed some 900 acres, mostly cotton.

The settlement was first called New Prospect, but when residents applied for a post office in 1885 that name was rejected, and the office was instead named Maynard.

Maynard was incorporated on October 17, 1895.

The area's three freshwater springs had drawn Osage hunters and travelers since the Louisiana Purchase era, and the town grew up along the route of the old Southwest Trail.

In 1894 Eli Abbott opened a boarding school in Maynard called the Abbott Institute; it later became the Maynard Baptist Academy and then the Ouachita Baptist Academy, affiliated with what is now Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia.

The academy was sold to the Maynard School District in 1928, and today the town is served by Maynard Elementary School and Maynard High School.

The Maynard Pioneer Museum and Park, founded in 1980 around a relocated nineteenth-century log cabin on Highway 328, preserves the town's pioneer heritage.

Every September since 1981, the town's Pioneer Days festival has drawn between 5,000 and 8,000 visitors — more than ten times Maynard's own population.

Beside the Maynard Community Center stands the town's 1936 jail, whose door was famously made from wagon wheel rims; it was last used in 1988 to hold a man charged with public intoxication.