Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in Mitchellville, AR

Mitchellville is a small second-class city in Desha County in the Arkansas Delta, bordering the larger city of Dumas and covering only about 0.12 square miles.

Mitchellville is the result of an experiment in city planning: in the 1940s the Watson District Association, a group of twenty-nine Black Baptist congregations in Desha and Lincoln counties, bought a former New Deal camp site and divided it into lots sold to Black families, sometimes for as little as fifty dollars.

The land had previously been a National Youth Administration camp for young unemployed workers, established on thirty-seven acres north of Dumas during the Great Depression and closed in 1944.

The community was named to honor John Mitchell, the leader of the church association that founded it.

Mitchellville incorporated as a second-class city on May 21, 1963, hoping to bring paved roads, water, and sewer service to its residents.

Mitchellville has the highest percentage of African American residents of any city in Arkansas, and it is also one of the poorest cities in the state.

Civil rights leader Daisy Bates took up Mitchellville's cause in the late 1960s, organizing surveys and civic education with Ouachita Baptist University professor Bob Riley; by 1970 a water and sewer system had been installed with federal grants and loans.

Bates famously bought a fire truck from the New York City Fire Department for one dollar and exchanged it with the Little Rock Fire Department for a smaller, fully equipped truck for Mitchellville's volunteer firefighters.

A Head Start program was established in Mitchellville in 1973, in a community where illiteracy had been measured at seventy-five percent in the 1960s.

A wood-products mill built by the Purveyor Wood Products Company in 1957 and the Grain Dryer Cooperative provided some of the town's early jobs.