Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Poplar Bluff, MO

Poplar Bluff is the county seat of Butler County in southeastern Missouri and is known as 'The Gateway to the Ozarks.'

The first permanent European family settled in the Poplar Bluff area in 1819; Butler County was organized in 1849 with Poplar Bluff as its seat, and the first courthouse went up in 1855.

Poplar Bluff takes its name from a bluff overlooking the Black River that was once covered with tulip poplar trees — one of the tree's few abundant stands west of the Mississippi River; the Butler County Courthouse now sits on that site.

Poplar Bluff had a population of 16,225 at the 2020 census and 6,638 households, and it anchors a micropolitan area covering all of Butler County.

On May 9, 1927, a tornado leveled most of Poplar Bluff, including its original business district along Main and Broadway, killing 98 people and tying it as the seventeenth-deadliest tornado in U.S. history.

Poplar Bluff stands at the crossroads of U.S. Route 60 and U.S. Route 67 in the 'Three Rivers' country, sitting on the Black River roughly midway between the Current River and the St. Francis River.

Poplar Bluff sits along an escarpment where the foothills of the Ozarks, to the north and west, give way to the flat Mississippi embayment lowlands to the south and east.

Poplar Bluff is home to Three Rivers College, a public community college founded in 1966 when voters in Butler, Carter, Ripley and Wayne counties approved its taxing district; it enrolled about 2,600 students in the fall of 2024.

The largest nail manufacturer in the United States, Mid-Continent Steel and Wire, is located in Poplar Bluff.

More than twenty Poplar Bluff properties are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including the Rodgers Theatre Building, the Poplar Bluff Public Library, and two historic railroad depots.