Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Wrightsville, AR

Wrightsville is a city in southeastern Pulaski County on Arkansas Highway 365, about ten miles southeast of Little Rock, and it is part of the Little Rock–North Little Rock–Conway metropolitan area.

The community began in the 1870s as a refueling station on the Little Rock, Mississippi, and Texas Railroad between Little Rock and Pine Bluff, and it was probably named for a railroad official after nearly being called Isbell.

Wrightsville existed as an unincorporated settlement for more than a century before incorporating as a town on January 3, 1973, and it re-incorporated as a second-class city in 1982 so it could provide city services.

The 2020 census counted 1,542 people and 295 households in Wrightsville, down from a peak of 2,114 people in 2010, a swing driven largely by the population of its state correctional facility.

Since 1981 Wrightsville has been home to the Arkansas Department of Correction's Wrightsville Unit, a roughly 3,300-acre facility that is the city's principal employer and was annexed into the city limits in 1998.

The Wrightsville Unit raises beef cattle and manufactures furniture, and the prison site formerly housed the Arkansas Negro Boys' Industrial School.

On March 5, 1959, a fire at the Negro Boys' Industrial School dormitory killed twenty-one Black teenagers who were trapped behind locked doors, one of the deadliest institutional fires in Arkansas history.

The state had established that juvenile correctional facility at Wrightsville in 1931 for young African-American males, and its main building was constructed by the Works Progress Administration.

During the great Arkansas River flood of 1927, the American Red Cross tended to 880 refugees in the Wrightsville area.

Wrightsville students attend the Pulaski County Special School District, zoned to Daisy Bates Elementary School, Mills Middle School, and Wilbur D. Mills University Studies High School.