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

Flippin is a city in eastern Marion County in the Arkansas Ozarks, sitting just south of Bull Shoals Lake about seven miles northeast of the county seat of Yellville.

Flippin takes its name from the family of Thomas H. Flippin, a Tennessee migrant who arrived in 1837, farmed in the area, and served as clerk of Marion County.

The community began in the early 1800s as the Barrens, a small settlement with a general store, flour mill, and cotton gin near the site of Flippin's present-day airport, and local legend says it was also once called Goatville after a goat butted an unwanted peddler out of the store.

The 1840 census already counted 302 people in Flippin Barrens, every one of them listed with farmer as an occupation.

Flippin's first post office opened in 1878, and after the settlement shifted toward the White River Railway line in the early 1900s, the town incorporated on October 8, 1921, with James M. Keeter as its first mayor.

Work on Bull Shoals Dam transformed Flippin in the 1940s: rock blasted from Lee's Mountain was carried to the dam site on a conveyor belt four feet wide and seven miles long that ran twenty-four hours a day.

When Bull Shoals Dam was completed in 1951, the new lake and the White River launched a tourism economy of trout-fishing resorts and guide services that remains central to Flippin.

Flippin is the hometown of Ranger Boats, founded there in 1968 by Forrest L. and Nina Wood and generally credited with introducing the modern bass boat.

The first six Ranger boats were built inside what is now Flippin City Hall, and after a 1971 fire destroyed the original plant it was rebuilt, keeping boat building as Marion County's signature industry.

The Flippin School District runs the town's public schools, including Flippin High School; the school began in a one-room building in 1895, was accredited in 1926, and graduated its first class of six seniors in 1929.