Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Pensacola, OK

Pensacola, Oklahoma — not to be confused with the Florida city of the same name — is a tiny town in Mayes County on State Highway 28, just west of Grand Lake o' the Cherokees.

Pensacola's story began around 1840 as a way station on the old Texas Road at the Cabin Creek crossing of the Grand River, established by Joseph Lynch Martin, known as "Greenbrier Joe."

During the Civil War the Union Army commandeered the Pensacola station as a supply post on the route between Fort Scott, Kansas, and Fort Gibson in Indian Territory.

A post office opened at Pensacola in 1896, but the modern town dates to 1912, when Kentucky settler James Sims Wilson filed the townsite plat on April 2 of that year as the Missouri, Oklahoma and Gulf Railroad arrived.

Pensacola incorporated in 1938, just as construction began on the great dam project that would transform the country around it.

The town's landmark namesake is the nearby Pensacola Dam, a multiple-arch buttress dam built by the Grand River Dam Authority beginning in 1938 and opened on March 21, 1940, which created the 46,500-acre Grand Lake o' the Cherokees.

Pensacola Dam stretches 6,565 feet across the Grand River, rises up to 150 feet high, generates 120 megawatts from six hydroelectric units, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003.

Pensacola has stayed small in every era: the census counted 71 residents in 2000, 125 in 2010, and 101 in 2020.

For most of its history Pensacola was surrounded on three sides by the Wilson ranch and remained a quiet farming and ranching town, even after its bank failed in 1921.

Pensacola sits about five miles west of Langley on Grand Lake and eight miles east of Adair, in the lake country of northeastern Mayes County.