Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Pampa, TX

Pampa is a city in the Texas Panhandle and the county seat of Gray County, as well as the principal city of the Pampa micropolitan area covering Gray and Roberts counties.

Pampa's name comes from the Quechua word pampa, meaning plain, and the town was named after the Pampas lowlands of Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil.

Pampa grew from a railroad stop designated in 1887 on land owned by the Francklyn Land and Cattle Company, later the White Deer Land Company; its first resident was railroad section foreman Thomas H. Lane, who became its first postmaster when the post office opened in 1892.

White Deer Lands manager George Tyng laid out the townsite, and his successor Timothy Dwight Hobart sold lots only to buyers who agreed to settle on and develop the land, quickly turning Pampa into an agricultural center.

Oil and gas discoveries in the Texas Panhandle - capped by a major discovery well drilled five miles south of Pampa in 1926 - set off a boom so strong that the Gray County seat was moved from Lefors to Pampa in 1928.

Pampa counted 16,867 residents in the 2020 census, down from its oil-boom heights, when its population stood above 21,000 in the early 1970s.

Pampa has about 6,689 households, and about 74.1 percent of its homes are owner-occupied, with a median home value of about $100,700.

Folk singer Woody Guthrie lived in Pampa from 1929 into the 1930s, learning guitar, working at Harris Drugs, and forming his first band, the Corn Cob Trio, while the town rode its oil boom.

Guthrie was in Pampa for the great dust storm of April 14, 1935, an experience that inspired his song So Long, It's Been Good to Know You and echoes through his Dust Bowl ballads.

The old Harris Drugs building on Cuyler Street, where Guthrie once worked, is now the Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center.