Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Beulah, MS

Beulah is a town in Bolivar County, Mississippi, served by Mississippi Highway 1, with Lake Beulah, an oxbow lake formerly connected to the Mississippi River, lying west of the town.

Beulah is named after the Christian hymn "Beulah Land," a favorite of Frank A. Montgomery, an early settler in western Bolivar County.

As of the 2020 census, Beulah had a population of 242, down from 348 in 2010 and 473 in 2000, while its earliest tabulated population was 506 in 1930.

In the 2000 census, Beulah had 139 households.

The land southwest of Beulah was owned by a Choctaw family in the 1830s, and after a series of lawsuits cost them the land, Charles Clark took ownership and established the Doro Plantation in the late 1840s and early 1850s, which grew to over 5,000 acres and became the most prosperous slave-owning plantation in the region, operating until 1913.

The Mississippi River once flowed next to Beulah along "Beulah Bend," now Lake Beulah, and Clark was often visited by Mark Twain while Twain was writing Life on the Mississippi.

Mississippi River boats landed in the community, and freshwater clam harvesting, known as "clammin," enabled a thriving pearl button industry.

In 1863, Union soldiers altered the course of the river by constructing a channel to avoid Beulah Bend, cutting Beulah off from river commerce and destroying the nearby towns of Prentiss and Napoleon.

In 1866, Montgomery donated the village of Beulah to the county and gave $1,600 to build a courthouse, with a two-room log jail also built, and Beulah became the first county seat, with a Masonic Lodge, church, school, bank, stores, post office, and the Bolivar Times newspaper edited there, until the seat moved to Floreyville, now Rosedale, in 1872.

After the Civil War, numerous freedmen bought and cleared land in the bottomlands away from the river, but by 1910 declining conditions had caused most to lose their land, and beginning in the early 1900s thousands of black Mississippians left as part of the Great Migration north by railroad.