Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Zinc, AR

Zinc is a small town in eastern Boone County, Arkansas, on Sugar Orchard Creek, about nine miles east of Harrison, the county seat.

Zinc was incorporated on March 10, 1904, and the 2020 census counted 92 residents.

As its name suggests, Zinc was founded as a mining town: zinc and lead mining in the area began in the 1890s and peaked during World War I.

The first settler on the town site was Elias Barham, whose land purchase dates to 1890; he ran cattle, crops, and small mines, and opened a general store with his brother George Solomon Barham before selling land in 1900 to T. R. Cave to lay out a mining town.

A post office was established in Zinc in 1900 and remained open until 1975.

A flood in 1927 damaged homes and businesses in Zinc, and the town's census population peaked at 188 in 1930 before the mines' postwar price collapse emptied the area.

Zinc's last store closed in the late 1960s, and the 2010 census counted 103 people in 37 households.

Two sites in Zinc are listed on the National Register of Historic Places: the Elliott and Anna Barham House and the Zinc Swinging Bridge over Sugar Orchard Creek.

Zinc, along with Bergman, is served by the Bergman School District, and the town is part of the Harrison Micropolitan Statistical Area.

In the twenty-first century Zinc drew national attention as the home of a chapter of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan led by Thomas Robb, an organization classified as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.