Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in St. Charles, AR

St. Charles is a town in Arkansas County, Arkansas, perched on a bluff overlooking the White River.

Fur trader Pierre Pertuis settled at the site after purchasing a 1797 Spanish land grant.

By 1839 Charles W. Belknap owned the site, briefly called Belknap's Bluff, and built an adobe house, one of only a few on the Arkansas frontier, that later served as a hospital for both sides during the Civil War.

The name St. Charles first appears in 1850, when Belknap became postmaster; he platted the town and sold lots, and St. Charles flourished in the 1850s as a White River shipping port.

On June 17, 1862, during the Battle of St. Charles, a single Confederate shot pierced the steam drum of the Union ironclad USS Mound City, scalding most of her crew; about 150 of the roughly 175 men aboard were killed or injured.

That shot has traditionally been described as the deadliest single shot of the Civil War.

The town was mostly destroyed in the 1862 battle, and the St. Charles Battle Monument of 1919, a granite monolith topped by an inverted cannon barrel, honors both Union and Confederate dead and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In the spring of 1904, white mobs in St. Charles murdered thirteen Black citizens, an episode the Encyclopedia of Arkansas notes may have been the deadliest lynching in American history.

St. Charles remained an important river port until railroads reached DeWitt, after which its economy rested on timber, fishing, hunting, trapping, and collecting mussel shells for the button industry.

A school district opened in St. Charles in 1891 and held the first commencement exercises in Arkansas County in 1892.