Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Gurdon, AR

Gurdon is a second-class city in southern Clark County, Arkansas, and it is the second-largest city in the county, behind Arkadelphia, the county seat fifteen miles to the northeast.

The town grew up as a railroad and timber center on the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway; its post office had operated under the name Tate until it was renamed Gurdon on March 15, 1876.

Sources disagree on the name's origin: Clark County tradition credits railroad surveyor Gurdon Cunningham, while another account traces it to the middle name of railroad executive Henry Gurdon Marquand.

Gurdon was incorporated on November 8, 1880, and by the early 1880s the surrounding pine forest supported ten large lumber mills around the booming town.

Gurdon is the birthplace of the Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo, a fraternal society of lumber industry workers founded there in 1892; its Hoo-Hoo monument in town was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.

Four other Gurdon properties are on the National Register of Historic Places: the Missouri Pacific Depot, the June Sandidge House, the Roanoke Baptist Church, and the Horace Estes House.

Gurdon is best known for the Gurdon Light, a mysterious glowing light reported since the 1930s along the railroad tracks about four miles north of town near Interstate 30, which local legend ties to the 1931 murder of railroad foreman Will McClain.

The Gurdon Light reached a national audience when NBC's Unsolved Mysteries featured it in 1994, and scientific investigations of the phenomenon have remained inconclusive.

The 2020 census counted 1,840 people in Gurdon, in 746 households, down from the city's peak of 2,707 residents in 1980 as the timber economy shrank.

Gurdon students attend the Gurdon School District and Gurdon High School, whose teams are the Go-Devils in purple and gold.