Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Prattsville, AR

Prattsville is a small city on Arkansas Highway 270 in Grant County, a few miles west of Sheridan, the county seat.

Although the community had been continuously settled for more than a century, Prattsville did not incorporate until September 10, 1962, and it reincorporated as a second-class city early in the twenty-first century.

Prattsville was first settled in 1841, when Elder Joab Pratt, a Baptist preacher, led a wagon train of families — including the Mayfields, Pumphreys, McDaniels, and Cobbs — from Bibb County, Alabama, into what was then Saline County.

Joab Pratt operated Pratt's Ferry on the Saline River near where Highway 270 now crosses, served as postmaster of the Lost Creek post office in 1846, and founded the Philadelphia Baptist Church; a post office established in 1857 took the name Prattsville.

The pre-statehood Old Camden Trail, one of only five main roads in nineteenth-century Arkansas, ran through Prattsville on its way between Little Rock and Camden.

During the Civil War Camden Expedition in 1864, Union general Frederick Steele attempted to cross the Saline River at Pratt's Ferry to retreat to Little Rock, but high water forced his army south to the crossing that became the Battle of Jenkins Ferry.

An archaeological survey conducted in 1973 found evidence of a prehistoric settlement in the vicinity of Prattsville.

The 2020 census counted 289 residents in Prattsville, and at the 2000 census the city had 282 people living in 115 households.

Prattsville's children attend the Sheridan School District, into which the Prattsville School District merged on July 1, 1994.

Prattsville is the birthplace of David Delano Glover, who served six terms as a U.S. representative from Arkansas between 1929 and 1935; his brother Robert W. Glover introduced the resolution that created Arkansas's four state agricultural colleges.