Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Parkin, AR

Parkin is a city in eastern Cross County, Arkansas, on the east bank of the St. Francis River just south of the mouth of the Tyronza River, in the heart of the Arkansas Delta.

Parkin's recorded history reaches back to 1541, when Hernando de Soto's expedition camped with the Casqui people, whose principal village stood at what is now Parkin.

Parkin Archeological State Park preserves that village: a 17-acre fortified Mississippian settlement occupied for centuries, ringed by a defensive moat and a log palisade wall, with a large platform mound on the riverbank.

Scholars identify the Parkin site as the capital of Casqui, a province of villages along the St. Francis and Tyronza rivers whose people may have numbered in the thousands; Spanish artifacts found at the site support the identification.

The Parkin site is a National Historic Landmark — one of only about ten in Arkansas — and the state park, which opened in 1994, also hosts an Arkansas Archeological Survey research station.

The first European settlers founded the frontier town of Smithdale, about two and a half miles east of present-day Parkin, in 1852.

In the early 1900s the Northern Ohio Cooperage and Lumber Company built a large sawmill at Parkin and dumped its sawdust into the ancient moat — creating 'Sawdust Hill' and inadvertently helping preserve the archaeological site.

The park also preserves the circa-1910 Northern Ohio School, a one-room schoolhouse built for the children of the sawmill's mostly African American workforce and the only one of Parkin's early schoolhouses still standing.

Parkin was incorporated on May 10, 1912.

Parkin's population peaked at 2,035 in 1980 but fell as the timber industry left; the 2020 census counted 794 people in 312 households, and much of its historic downtown now stands vacant.