Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in McGehee, AR

McGehee (pronounced mə-GHEE) is a city in Desha County in the Arkansas Delta of southeastern Arkansas, in the rich alluvial farmland near the Mississippi River.

The city is named for the McGehee family, who came from Alabama in 1857; Abner McGehee purchased the 240 acres on July 1, 1876, on which the town was later built.

McGehee is a railroad town at its core: when the railroad arrived in 1878, settlers followed, and Abner McGehee ran a commissary that housed the new post office in 1879, serving 400 to 500 people with Abner himself as first postmaster.

McGehee was incorporated on March 5, 1906, and its first town council meeting was held on July 21, 1906.

As of the 2020 census, McGehee had a population of 3,849 people living in 1,577 households, down from 4,219 in 2010 as Delta farm mechanization continued to shrink local employment.

For more than fifty years the Missouri Pacific Railroad was a major employer in McGehee, until its roundhouse shops closed in 1954; today the city is still served directly by the North Louisiana and Arkansas Railroad and the Arkansas Midland Railroad.

McGehee is home to the World War II Japanese American Internment Museum, which opened on April 16, 2013, inside the south building of the city's historic Missouri Pacific depot on Railroad Street.

The museum interprets the nearby Rohwer camp in Desha County and the Jerome camp to the south, which together incarcerated some 17,000 Japanese Americans during World War II; actor George Takei, who was held at Rohwer as a child, narrates the museum's audio tour.

The McGehee School District operates McGehee Elementary School (pre-kindergarten through grade 6) and McGehee High School (grades 7–12), whose teams are the Owls, wearing red and white.

Higher education came to McGehee in 1975 with the Great Rivers Vocational Technical School, whose campus is now affiliated with the University of Arkansas at Monticello.