Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in New Madrid, MO

New Madrid is the county seat of New Madrid County, Missouri, a Mississippi River city located 42 miles southwest of Cairo, Illinois, on the north side of the Kentucky Bend, where the river loops around an exclave of Fulton County, Kentucky.

Locally the name is pronounced "MAD-rid," and the town began in the early 1780s as a Native American trading settlement called L'Anse a la Graise — "Cove of Grease" — where hunters processed bear and buffalo fat for the fur trade.

The town of New Madrid was formally founded in 1789 by Colonel George Morgan, an American Revolutionary War veteran who recruited American families to settle there under a Spanish land grant.

By the late 1790s New Madrid had around 800 residents and was one of the most important settlements on the Mississippi between St. Louis and New Orleans.

New Madrid was the epicenter of the 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes, a series of nearly 2,000 tremors reaching roughly magnitude 8 — the most powerful non-subduction-zone earthquakes ever recorded in the United States — which were felt as far away as the East Coast.

The Mississippi River has repeatedly eaten away New Madrid's banks, washing away a Spanish fort and whole blocks of the town and forcing the community to shift sites over its history.

In 1838 New Madrid became a point on the Trail of Tears, as thousands of Native Americans were forcibly removed westward through the area toward Oklahoma.

During the Civil War, the Battle of Island Number Ten was fought on the Mississippi River near New Madrid in 1862.

New Madrid has a humid subtropical climate with about 49 inches of rain a year, a record high of 107°F set in August 1964, and a record low of −14°F set in January 1982.

New Madrid's population was 2,787 at the 2020 census, living in 1,210 households, down from a peak of 3,350 in 1990.