Discreet 24/7 Biohazard Remediation in Smackover, AR

Smackover is a small city in northern Union County, Arkansas, sitting along Smackover Creek about twelve miles north of El Dorado.

Smackover's unusual name is the Anglicized form of the French 'Sumac Couvert,' meaning 'covered in sumac bushes,' a description French settlers applied to the area as early as 1686.

Before oil, Smackover was a quiet cotton-and-timber community whose post office opened in 1879.

The Smackover Oil Field was discovered in 1922, and sawmill owner Sidney Umsted's well of July 1, 1922 touched off one of the fastest oil booms in American history.

Within six months of the discovery, more than 1,000 wells had been drilled around Smackover with a 92 percent success rate, and the town's population exploded from about 90 people to roughly 25,000.

Smackover was incorporated on November 3, 1922, in the middle of the boom — lawlessness was so rampant that none of the twenty-five petitioners for incorporation was willing to hold public office.

By 1925 the Smackover field led the nation in oil production, and wells across Union County pumped some 69 million barrels that year.

The Jurassic Smackover Formation, one of the most important oil-bearing rock layers in the Gulf Coast region, takes its name from the town after oil was found in its limestone beneath Smackover in 1936.

The boom is long past: the 2020 census counted 1,630 people in Smackover in 704 households.

Smackover is home to the Arkansas Museum of Natural Resources, the state museum of the 1920s south Arkansas oil and brine boom, which features an indoor reconstruction of the town's 1920s downtown and an Oil Field Park of historic derricks.