Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Scooba, MS

Scooba is a town in Kemper County, Mississippi, served by ZIP code 39358.

Scooba was founded on December 13, 1858, and incorporated on April 9, 1873, and its name is a Choctaw word meaning 'reed brake,' with the early settlement noted for its productive farmland.

The first permanent settlement at Scooba was made in the 1830s, a post office opened on March 9, 1836, under the name Scoober, and the Mobile and Ohio Railroad built a line through town by August 1856, with a station opened by December 13, 1858.

The 2020 census counted 744 people, 191 households, and 107 families in Scooba, up from 732 residents in 2010.

Scooba's census history runs from 286 residents in 1900 to a peak of 933 in 1930, then 632 in 2000 and 744 in 2020.

The town covers 2.5 square miles, all land, adjacent to U.S. Route 45, Mississippi Highway 16, and a railroad, 35 miles north of Meridian and 50 miles south of Columbus.

By the early 1900s Scooba had several homes, a hotel, a livery barn, a post office, two sawmills, a cotton gin, a general store, five churches, a school, and the Bank of Kemper, established in 1904, and the town was a local market for cotton.

A Democratic weekly newspaper, the Kemper Herald, was established in Scooba in 1876.

In late December 1906, Scooba and Wahalak were the sites of white rioting against Black residents that began with confrontations between passengers and conductors on the railroad, leaving 12 Black people and two white people dead by December 26 and prompting the county sheriff to call in the state militia.

Scooba is the home of the main campus of East Mississippi Community College, including the college system's administrative headquarters, and the college's football program was featured on the Netflix documentary Last Chance U, which chronicled its 2015 and 2016 seasons.