Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Clarksville, MO

Clarksville is a historic Mississippi River city in Pike County, Missouri, settled in 1817 by migrants from Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia, and platted in 1819.

Clarksville was named for William Clark — of Lewis and Clark fame — who was governor of the Missouri Territory at the time; the town celebrated its bicentennial in 2017.

River men once nicknamed Clarksville 'Appletown' because so many apples were shipped out from its busy river port before the railroad arrived in 1879.

Clarksville's population peaked at 1,493 in 1880; the 2020 census counted 372 people, and the 2010 census recorded 442 people in 210 households.

Clarksville is the last town in Missouri whose riverfront commercial district still stands intact facing the Mississippi River, a district placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991 and filled today with antique shops and working artisans.

The Clarksville Skylift, which carried visitors from the 1960s to the early 1990s to a lookout offering an 800-square-mile view, stands at what is said to be the highest point on the Mississippi River — but it sits atop an ancient Native American burial mound, and efforts to reopen it have been contested by the Sac and Fox Nation.

Lock and Dam No. 24 on the Mississippi sits at the north edge of Clarksville and gives visitors a close-up view of barge and towboat traffic.

Clarksville is one of the premier bald eagle watching sites in the United States — the World Bird Sanctuary has called it the 'eagle viewing capitol of the United States' — and every January the town hosts its two-day Eagle Days festival as eagles gather by the hundreds below the dam to fish.

Just north of town, the 6,705-acre Ted Shanks Conservation Area protects Mississippi Flyway wetlands used by migrating waterfowl, along a stretch of flyway used by nearly half of North America's waterfowl.

Clarksville students attend Clopton Elementary School and Clopton High School, operated in town by the Pike County R-III School District, and the town also has its own Clarksville Public Library.