Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Wilmot, AR

Wilmot is a small city in eastern Ashley County, Arkansas, on U.S. Highway 165 between Parkdale and the Louisiana state line — the last community on the highway before the border.

The city borders Lake Enterprise, an oxbow lake that was once part of Bayou Bartholomew and remains a popular spot for local fishing and watersports.

Wilmot is one of the older settlements in eastern Ashley County: it was a steamboat stop known as Enterprise, with a post office called Bartholomew established in 1880, long before the railroad arrived.

The railroad came through about 1890, built a depot, and renamed the community in honor of one of its surveyors, and Wilmot was incorporated on May 3, 1898.

A mound north of Lake Enterprise, excavated by the Arkansas Archeological Survey in 1997 and thought to have been built around 1500 B.C., may be the oldest mound in Arkansas.

Wilmot's population peaked at 1,227 in 1980 and then declined for decades as agriculture mechanized; the 2020 census counted 416 residents, and at the 2000 census the city had 786 people living in 290 households.

Roughly three-quarters of Wilmot's residents are Black, and historians estimate that about half of the Black residents of eastern Ashley County emigrated in the middle of the twentieth century.

In 1927, a young Black man named Winston Pounds was tortured and hanged in Wilmot by a mob of some fifty armed white men, a lynching documented by the Encyclopedia of Arkansas.

Wilmot's own school district consolidated into the Hamburg School District on July 1, 1986, and the Hamburg district kept Wilmot Elementary School open until about 2016, when falling enrollment — down to roughly 42 students — led to its closure despite a lawsuit challenging the decision.

Wilmot is the birthplace of Mamie Aselean Parker, a conservationist who worked nearly three decades with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.