Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Tucker, AR

Tucker is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Jefferson County, Arkansas, in the Arkansas Delta about 30 miles southeast of Little Rock.

The Census Bureau first listed Tucker as a CDP in the 2020 census, which counted 95 residents.

The community grew around the Tucker Plantation, established by John Woodfin Tucker in 1871 and named for his wife, Sarah E. Tucker; the cotton plantation grew to 2,800 acres worked by paid laborers and resident sharecroppers.

The Tucker family ran the community's store and post office, and used money-order sales at the post office as a makeshift banking service for customers who could not afford conventional bank accounts.

A federal guide counted 74 residents in Tucker around 1958, and in the 2020 census 89 of the CDP's 95 residents — nearly 94 percent — were Black or African American.

The community lends its name to the Arkansas Department of Correction's Tucker Unit and Maximum Security Unit, which stand just outside the CDP on prison-farm land the state purchased in 1916.

From 1933 the Tucker Unit housed Arkansas's death chamber, and the last execution carried out there, in 1964, came before the U.S. Supreme Court halted capital punishment nationwide in the 1970s.

Tucker's own Plum Bayou-Tucker School District was folded into a chain of consolidations in 1983, 1993, 2006, and 2021, and Tucker students are now zoned to schools in the Pine Bluff School District, ending with Pine Bluff High School.

Fire protection in Tucker is provided by the Tucker Volunteer Fire Department, whose station stands along Arkansas Highway 15.