Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Wabbaseka, AR

Wabbaseka is a small town in northern Jefferson County, on the combined U.S. Highways 63 and 79 between Humphrey and Altheimer, and it is part of the Pine Bluff micropolitan area.

The town's name traces to 'Bayou Wabbaseekee,' a stream surveyor William Pelham noted in 1836, itself derived from the Quapaw name Wadittesha Wattiska, or Black Clay Bayou, recorded when agent Antoine Barraque met Quapaw chief Heckaton there in 1826.

Wabbaseka was laid out in 1883 after the Texas and St. Louis Railway bought land from the Roberts family and built a depot; a post office opened the same year with Nathaniel T. Roberts as the first postmaster.

The town was incorporated on April 12, 1920, with local farmer George W. Haynes as its first mayor, after the Bank of Wabbaseka had opened its doors on January 8, 1917.

The 2020 census counted just 180 people in Wabbaseka, down from 255 in 2010 and a twentieth-century peak of 644 in 1970; the town covers only about 0.34 square miles.

Teacher Willie Kavanaugh Hocker, who began teaching in Wabbaseka in 1897 and taught there for thirty-four years, designed the Arkansas state flag that was adopted in 1913.

Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party leader and author of Soul on Ice, was born in Wabbaseka in 1935 and lived there until his family left in 1943.

Blues singer Queen Sylvia Embry was also born in Wabbaseka, on June 14, 1941.

A Methodist church was established in Wabbaseka in 1891, and the town's first school was named Willie K. Hocker High School before merging with Wabbaseka High School at integration in the late 1960s.

In the mid-1980s George Barnes became the first African American elected mayor of Wabbaseka.