24/7 Biohazard and Crime Scene Cleanup in Dierks, AR

Dierks is a city in Howard County in southwestern Arkansas, sitting in the valley of Holly Creek along the southern edge of the Ouachita Mountains where U.S. Routes 70 and 278 meet.

The town was originally called Hardscrabble and grew from a settlement reached by a wagon trail from Center Point in 1848; it took the name Dierks for Hans Dierks, the oldest of the four brothers who owned the Dierks Lumber and Coal Company.

Around 1900 the Dierks company began harvesting the tall pine forests around the town, and the census captured the timber boom: Dierks leapt from 272 residents in 1910 to 1,495 in 1920.

Dierks was incorporated on June 4, 1907, and the city celebrated the centennial of its founding in 2007.

The Dierks family's company amassed 1.75 million acres of timberland in Arkansas and Oklahoma before Weyerhaeuser bought it in 1969 for $317 million, and Weyerhaeuser operations remain central to the town's economy.

In 1907 local bottler John William Pate opened a company in Dierks producing fruit-flavored sodas in strawberry, orange, and lemon.

The 2020 census counted 916 residents in Dierks, living in 376 households, down from 1,133 in 2010 and a peak of 1,544 in 1930.

An EF3 tornado on April 9, 2009, destroyed Dierks's water treatment plant, forcing the city to rely on a temporary hookup to the Nashville Rural Water System and National Guard purification units, and in July 2019 flash flooding dumped 17 inches of rain on the city in less than 24 hours.

Each year on the first weekend of August, Dierks celebrates its logging heritage with the Pine Tree Festival at Jack Clawson Memorial Park, featuring a loader contest, barbecue cook-off, tractor and car shows, and a concert.

Dierks Lake, a reservoir on the Saline River seven miles northwest of the city, is a popular fishing spot with camping areas at Jefferson Ridge, Blue Ridge, and Horseshoe Bend.