Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Stamps, AR

Stamps is a city in Lafayette County in southwestern Arkansas that developed in the late nineteenth century as a lumber town on the railroad.

Stamps is best known as the childhood home of author and poet Maya Angelou, who was sent from St. Louis at age three in 1931 to live with her grandmother Annie Henderson and her uncle.

Angelou's grandmother ran the William Johnson General Merchandise Store, the only Black-owned business in Stamps, and those years in Stamps form the setting of much of her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

The town is named for the Stamps family: Hardy James Stamps arrived from Georgia in 1880 to run the Bodcaw lumber mill, and when a post office opened at the mill settlement in 1888 it was named Stamps, with his daughter Ella Crowell as its first postmistress.

Stamps was incorporated on April 11, 1898, the same year William Buchanan of the Bodcaw Lumber Company organized the Louisiana and Arkansas Railway in Stamps, which kept its principal shops and general office there.

The Bodcaw sawmill at Stamps grew until it was reputedly the largest yellow-pine sawmill in the world, and its roughly 100-acre mill pond survives as Lake June, now maintained by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission as a stocked fishing lake.

Angelou attended the Lafayette County Training School, a school for African American students built in 1929 with Rosenwald Fund support; it operated until Stamps schools desegregated in 1969 and is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, along with the town's 1905 Presbyterian church.

Stamps children today attend the Lafayette County School District, with Lafayette County High School located in Stamps and the district's elementary school in Lewisville.

In the 1940s and 1950s Arkansas Power and Light built a major natural-gas generating plant in Stamps, expanded in 1952 to 165,000 kilowatts of capacity, and the North Stamps oil field was opened the same year.

Red River Aluminum opened a recycling plant in Stamps in 1988 — at the time the only business of its kind in Arkansas — and after its 1998 closure the Environmental Protection Agency spent about $2 million cleaning up the contaminated site.