Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in Port Aransas, TX

Port Aransas is the only established town on Mustang Island, an 18-mile-long barrier island on the Texas Gulf Coast in Nueces County, and locals simply call it "Port A."

The town's first post office opened in 1888 under the name Ropesville; it was renamed Tarpon in 1896 for the prized game fish filling its waters, then became Port Aransas in 1910, and the city incorporated in 1911.

The first recorded permanent settler was Englishman Robert Ainsworth Mercer, who established the El Mar sheep and cattle ranch on the island in the 1850s, when wild mustangs still roamed its rangelands.

Pirate captain Jean Lafitte used Mustang Island as a camp in the early 1800s, and local legend holds that his buried treasure near Port Aransas is marked by a Spanish silver dagger driven through a spike.

The Tarpon Inn, built in 1886 from surplus lumber of Civil War barracks and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has walls covered with signed tarpon scales - including one from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who fished there in 1937.

Port Aransas is reached by free Texas Department of Transportation ferries that carry vehicles across the ship channel around the clock, a service that began with the six-car ferry Mitzi in the early automobile era.

The 2020 census counted just 2,904 year-round residents in Port Aransas, living in 1,400 households, with a notably old median age of 55.6 years - a small permanent population far outnumbered by the beach and fishing visitors it hosts.

Hurricane Harvey made landfall just up the coast on August 25, 2017, and devastated Port Aransas, but the town has since rebuilt its homes, hotels, and marinas.

Port Aransas is home to the University of Texas Marine Science Institute, founded in 1941 as the first permanent marine laboratory in Texas, on a 72-acre beachfront campus at the mouth of Aransas Pass.

The Marine Science Institute manages the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve, the third-largest estuarine research reserve in the United States, and runs the Amos Rehabilitation Keep, which rescues and rehabilitates injured sea turtles and marine birds.