Howardville Community Partnership, Missouri

What to know

The goal of the community was to build the Bootheel coalition and to honor Howardville as a historic African American community.

Old Sharecropper Cottage in the Missouri Bootheel

Howardville Community Partnership, Missouri

Partnership: Howardville serves as a model for Bootheel communities by promoting new medical clinics, improving water quality, securing funding, and planning for redevelopment.

Goal:

  • To honor Howardville as a historic African American community
  • To build a "Bootheel" coalition to support safe land reuse to improve community health
  • To combat community health inequities: Environmental pollution, blighted properties, unemployment, and lack of access to healthy foods and recreation
  • To plan for clinics, improved water quality, funding, and redevelopment

Community and population:

  • Located in Bootheel of Missouri in New Madrid County
  • Primarily African American (92.4%)
  • Lower median income and higher poverty rate (over 30%) than New Madrid County as a whole
  • Loss of local employers (closing and downsizing businesses)
  • Decay of Howardville High School—loss of a cultural icon

Environmental concerns‎

The Bootheel area is littered with petroleum brownfields, abandoned cotton gins, boarded buildings, volatile organic compounds, lead, and asbestos.

Health concerns‎

Some of the lowest county health rankings in the state; Limited access to healthy food and medical care.


Small grocery stores, but many Howardville and Bootheel residents drive to Sikeston (about 20 miles away) or other, more populated Bootheel towns to access a full range of fresh produce


Only full healthcare possibility for many Bootheel families: 2 small hospitals (which have lost hospital status but remain medical care centers), 25 miles north and south of Howardville


There is a local health department that provides some basic healthcare in New Madrid, but there is no local specialty care locally. Patients are transferred to Memphis (2 hours), Cape Girardeau (about 1 hour), or St. Louis (2.5 hours).

BROWN assistance and collaboration

  • Technical assistance to supplement EPA Cleanup Grant to remediate lead and asbestos exposure for 400 residents and workers (including Head Start children). Clean-up jobs created for two residents.
  • National recognition: 2 feature stories; write-up in Bloomberg magazine.
  • Connection to resources for historic preservation—registration for state and federal historic preservation in 2017 and 2018. $10,400 raised by the school restoration committee (2010-2019).
  • Assistance with cleanup of abandoned petroleum tanks: Lists and maps of locations throughout Bootheel; connection to a state program for assistance with inventory and site assessment
  • 2017 community meeting using ATSDR Land Reuse (Healthfield) Toolkit to encourage participation in community revitalization
  • $95,000 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health Leaders Program Funding awarded over 3 years for Healthfields redevelopment
  • Howardville School and Senior Housing Redevelopment concept plan
  • Training for 15 community leaders and partners to pursue up to $500,000 in EPA Coalition Assessment funds for New Madrid, Pemiscot, and Dunklin Counties
  • Attendance by 3 community leaders at July 2018 EPA Community Involvement Training in Kansas City, MO.
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Content Source:
Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry