Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Tupelo, AR

Tupelo is an incorporated town in the southern tip of Jackson County, Arkansas, set on a sandy ridge along the edge of the White River bottoms about eighteen miles south of Newport.

The name traces to Micajah B. McCoy, a South Carolina settler of the early 1840s whose plantation was called 'Tupelo,' and to the tupelo trees that once grew abundantly in the area.

Tupelo's first post office opened on June 12, 1884, under the name 'Ibet' and was renamed Tupelo later that year; the town plat was filed on August 22, 1884, with five blocks laid out on each side of the railroad.

Tupelo was a station on the narrow-gauge Batesville and Brinkley Railroad, where the daily passenger train from Brinkley, nicknamed 'Old Jude,' was turned around by hand on a turntable for the return trip.

By 1888 Tupelo had steam-powered sawmills and gristmills and a cotton gin, shipping local cotton and timber to market by rail.

The town was incorporated on December 22, 1904, and its Bank of Tupelo stayed in full operation through the bank-failure wave of the 1920s, though its safe was robbed of nearly $1,200 in 1942 by thieves the FBI caught in Chicago.

During the great Flood of 1927, the nearby Cache River spilled out of its banks and submerged buildings in Tupelo.

The Tupelo Special School District was consolidated into the Newport Public School District in 1930.

Tupelo native Albert Louis 'Tom' Collier served in the Arkansas House of Representatives from 1971 to 1993 and authored the 1973 act that made the honeybee Arkansas's official state insect.

Tupelo's population peaked at 317 in 1920 and fell through the twentieth century; the 2020 census counted just 70 residents, down sharply from 180 in 2010, and the 2000 census recorded 177 people in 76 households.