Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Winchester, AR

Winchester is a small town in northeastern Drew County in southeastern Arkansas, near U.S. Highway 65.

The town was incorporated on May 21, 1912.

The 2020 census counted 137 people in Winchester, down from a twentieth-century high of 279 in 1980; in 2000 the town had 191 people living in 69 households.

Winchester grew up around a depot and post office built in the late 1870s where the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railroad crossed Drew County, and it was presumably named because local plantation owner John Martin Taylor had been born in Winchester, Kentucky.

The town became a shipping point for logs, railroad ties, and other wood products from the Bayou Bartholomew country, and later for cotton as well.

In 1918, Winchester resident Robert L. Hill founded the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, a fraternal and social organization for African American men and women modeled on the Masonic lodge.

An exchange of gunshots at a meeting of Hill's union at Hoop Spur in Phillips County on September 30, 1919, led into the Elaine Massacre, and the union disbanded soon afterward.

At its early-1900s peak, Winchester had a bank, two cotton gins, a broom factory, a chair factory, a sawmill, a skating rink, a café, a Chinese bakery, a baseball team, and its own newspaper, the Winchester Independent.

U.S. Highway 65 was designated through Winchester in 1926, but when the highway was improved in 1940 it bypassed the town by about a mile to the east, hastening Winchester's decline.

Winchester's two schools were consolidated into the Dumas School District in 1956, and its students now attend Dumas High School.