Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Pinhook Pinhook, MO

Pinhook is an inactive village in Mississippi County in Missouri's Bootheel, and it no longer functions as a living town.

Pinhook was founded in the 1920s — in 1927, according to BlackPast.org — by African American sharecroppers who settled the flood-prone lowland because discrimination prevented Black families from buying land in safer areas.

Pinhook takes its name from a nearby ridge that was said to be shaped like the tip of a pinhook.

At its peak the largely African American community grew to nearly 250 people and supported a church, a grocery store and its own schools.

Pinhook sat inside the Birds Point–New Madrid Floodway, built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1932, so operating the floodway to protect downstream towns put the village directly in the water's path.

On May 2, 2011, the Army Corps of Engineers deliberately breached the Birds Point levee to relieve flooding threatening Cairo, Illinois, and Pinhook was submerged under many feet of water; its roughly 30 remaining residents had only hours to get out.

After the flood, Pinhook homeowners accepted a federal buyout covering 21 properties at a total cost of about $1.17 million, and former residents resettled mainly in East Prairie and Sikeston.

The last remaining buildings in Pinhook were bulldozed in August 2015, and in 2018 the state of Missouri awarded the Pinhook community a $450,000 grant to help relocate near Sikeston.

Pinhook's population fell from 48 people in 2000 and 30 in 2010 to just 6 residents at the 2020 census.