Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Nimmons, AR

Nimmons is a small incorporated town in eastern Clay County, Arkansas, about a mile west of the St. Francis River, which forms the border between northeastern Arkansas and the Missouri Bootheel.

Nimmons was born as a railroad and lumber stop in 1901, when the Malden Lumber Company of Malden, Missouri, pushed its narrow-gauge St. Louis, Kennett and Southeastern Railroad into the hardwood forests of eastern Clay County.

The settlement that grew up where two branch lines — one to Bear Station and one to Log Yard — connected was named Nimmons for a railroad worker.

The first buildings in Nimmons went up in 1901, a post office followed in 1903, and W. D. Lasswell platted the town for the lumber company, which was soon acquired by the Campbell Lumber Company.

In 1907, Nimmons merchants Pole Bollock and James Mitchell bought out their only competing store and then purchased 107 acres from the lumber company — including all thirty-nine buildings in town — briefly making them owners of essentially the whole town.

Nimmons was incorporated as a town on January 16, 1912.

At its lumber-era peak, Nimmons counted 297 residents in the 1920 census, but as the St. Francis River valley hardwood was cut out in the 1920s the railroad ended service, the stores and hotel closed for good, the post office shut in 1980, and the town shrank around farming.

The 2020 census recorded just 69 residents in Nimmons — exactly the same as in 2010, and down from 100 in 2000 — within a total area of only 0.25 square miles, all of it land.

The 2000 census counted 44 households and 50 housing units in Nimmons, with an average household size of 2.27 people.

Nimmons sits in the St. Francis Lowlands of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, flat Arkansas Delta country now given over to row-crop farming, where sand blows and sunken lands left by the 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes still mark the ground.