Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Pangburn, AR

Pangburn is a second-class city in extreme northwestern White County, on Arkansas Highway 16 midway between Searcy and Heber Springs and a quarter-mile south of the Little Red River.

Pangburn's population was 500 at the 2020 census, and the city covers just 0.54 square miles.

At the 2000 census, Pangburn had 654 residents living in 275 households.

The King family, the area's first recorded white settlers, arrived by flatboat around 1817.

The settlement was first called Judson — its first post office opened in 1856 — and was renamed Pangburn in 1880 for Dr. William David Pangburn, a native of Schenectady, New York, who had emigrated around 1860 and bought the land the city now occupies.

Pangburn was incorporated on April 8, 1911.

Pangburn once served riverboat traffic when the Little Red River was commercially navigable; the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad arrived in 1908, bringing the Western Tie and Timber Company and a cotton boom with three gins, before the line ceased operations in 1946.

About five miles southeast of Pangburn stood Titan II Launch Complex 373-4, the first Titan II missile facility built in Arkansas and the first placed on strategic alert, in May 1963; a fire at the silo on August 9, 1965 killed 53 men.

After Greers Ferry Dam was completed in 1962, the cold tailwater in the Little Red River below the dam made the Pangburn area famous for brown and rainbow trout fishing and turned the town into a fishing and retiree destination.

Natural-gas development in the Fayetteville Shale brought a boom to the Pangburn area in the 2000s, though it had largely dwindled by 2016.