Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Noel, MO

Noel is a city on the Elk River and Butler and Mill creeks in McDonald County, in the southwest corner of Missouri just three miles north of the Arkansas state line.

A post office called Noel has been in operation since 1886, and the community was named for brothers C. W. and W. J. Noel, stockmen and owners of a sawmill; the town was founded after the Kansas City, Pittsburg, and Gulf Railroad arrived.

Noel has capitalized on its Christmas-themed name — it bills itself as the 'Christmas City in the Ozark Vacation Land,' and like Santa Claus, Indiana, and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, it is one of the American towns famous for Christmas-season mail and postmarks.

Noel had 2,124 residents at the 2020 census, up from 1,832 in 2010, living in 687 households with an average household size of 3.09 people — well above the national norm.

Noel is a notably young town: at the 2010 census its median age was just 28.5 years, and nearly a third of its residents were under the age of 18.

Noel is home to a Tyson Foods chicken-processing plant, the town's major employer.

By 2010, between 400 and 500 Somali refugees and another 60 to 70 Sudanese refugees had settled in Noel, most of them working at the Tyson Foods plant, giving the small Ozarks town an unusually international population.

On August 3, 1969, a freight train exploded while passing through Noel, spraying metal fragments through houses and buildings over a six-block area, killing one person and injuring 40 others.

Public education in Noel is administered by the McDonald County R-1 School District, and the town has a public library, the Noel Community Branch Library.

Noel covers about 2.10 square miles, of which about 3.6 percent is water where Butler and Mill creeks meet the Elk River.