Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Houston, AR

Houston is a tiny town in northern Perry County, Arkansas — not the Texas metropolis — and it is part of the Little Rock–North Little Rock–Conway metropolitan statistical area.

Although often assumed to honor Sam Houston, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas notes stronger evidence that the town was named for John L. Houston, who operated a ferry on the Fourche La Fave River nearby around 1847.

A post office was established at Houston in the summer of 1878 after postmaster James W. Marshall's first suggested name, Jamesville, was rejected because another Arkansas community already used it.

Houston literally picked up and moved: when the Choctaw, Oklahoma and Gulf Railroad was completed through Perry County in 1900, homes and businesses relocated two miles south to land Margaret Long donated by the tracks, and the abandoned original site became 'Old Houston,' of which only a cemetery remains.

Houston was incorporated on June 21, 1902, the same year a two-room schoolhouse serving grades one through twelve was built.

In 1908 outlaws robbed Houston's bank and set it on fire as they fled, burning several other downtown stores; a new bank was completed by 1910.

The Methodist church built in 1912 after the congregation outgrew its earlier building is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Great Flood of 1927 isolated Houston and submerged even the railroad tracks, and in 1929 a burning train carrying gasoline, crude oil, kerosene, and alcohol wrecked in town, forcing a temporary evacuation.

The Works Progress Administration built Houston a new school in 1935 after fire destroyed the earlier brick schoolhouse and community building in 1934, but later consolidation erased the Houston school district and the WPA building was razed.

The 2020 census counted just 143 people in Houston, down from 173 in 2010 and a peak of 403 in 1920; the 2000 census recorded 159 residents in 74 households.