Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Fort Gibson, OK

Fort Gibson, in Muskogee County, calls itself "The Oldest Town in Oklahoma" - it was founded on April 21, 1824, when Colonel Matthew Arbuckle of the U.S. Army established Cantonment Gibson, then the westernmost military outpost in the United States.

The fort was named for Colonel George Gibson, the U.S. Army's first commissary general, and it stood near the Three Forks, where the Grand, Verdigris and Arkansas rivers converge.

Fort Gibson recorded Oklahoma's first weather observations - Army surgeons at the garrison hospital began keeping meteorological records in July 1824, making it the state's first weather observatory.

The town claims several other Oklahoma firsts from its frontier era, including the first telephone, the first drama theater and the first steamboat landing in what is now Oklahoma.

Author Washington Irving visited Fort Gibson in the summer of 1832 and set out from the fort on the western journey he later chronicled in his book "A Tour on the Prairies."

Fort Gibson sits near the end of the Cherokees' Trail of Tears - the fort was a major arrival and supply point for Native nations forcibly removed to Indian Territory.

The U.S. Army abandoned Fort Gibson in 1890, and the surrounding settlement formally incorporated as the town of Fort Gibson on May 20, 1898.

Fort Gibson National Cemetery, established in 1868 after the Civil War, now covers 48.3 acres and holds more than 25,000 interments, including Seminole chief Billy Bowlegs and Talahina Rogers Houston, a wife of Sam Houston.

Nearly 2,000 of the graves in Fort Gibson National Cemetery hold unknown individuals, most of them soldiers who died at the frontier post, where yellow fever epidemics repeatedly forced the Army to open new burial grounds.

The Fort Gibson Historic Site, managed by the Oklahoma Historical Society, preserves a reconstruction of the early log fort and stockade along with original stone buildings from the 1840s through the 1870s.