Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Tyronza, AR

Tyronza is a small city in Poinsett County in the Arkansas Delta, set along U.S. Highway 63 midway between Jonesboro and Memphis, Tennessee, and counted as part of the Jonesboro metropolitan area.

The community began in 1883, when the Kansas City, Fort Scott and Gulf Railway built a depot called Tyronza Station, named for the nearby Tyronza River, and the settlement that grew around it started out as a lumber town.

Tyronza was incorporated as a city on May 17, 1926.

The 2020 census counted 716 people in Tyronza, living in 376 households.

Long before the railroad arrived, the town site was home to a Native American community dating to about AD 1300-1400, and an 1884 Smithsonian Institution survey recorded as many as forty-nine Indigenous mounds in the immediate vicinity.

Tyronza is best known as the birthplace of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, founded in 1934 when eleven white and seven Black tenant farmers met with two local businessmen in a schoolhouse west of town to organize against abusive plantation owners.

The union founded at Tyronza grew into a national movement that drew attention to the discrimination faced by mostly African American sharecroppers across the South.

The Southern Tenant Farmers Museum, opened in October 2006 in the Mitchell-East Building that held the union's original offices, is operated by Arkansas State University and preserves the history of tenant-farmer organizing and of the region.

The Tyronza Water Tower was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.

Tyronza was the home of Dr. L. H. McDaniel, a local physician who treated patients all over eastern Arkansas regardless of their ability to pay and who became a close adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congressman Wilbur D. Mills in the creation of Medicare and Medicaid.