Hiram School, approved in 1889, was a large one-room building with a belfry.

Beyond the Little Red to Hiram Bluff

Searcy Daily Citizen, May 3, 1972

The following article is as told by Elbert C. Nowell, who lived beside Bluff Street when Hiram was in its heyday.

To a sightseer today up on Hiram Bluff, three miles north of Pangburn, the name Hiram may mean no more than a picturesque place of frontier charm surrounding the setting of an early schoolhouse. But Hiram was once a thriving community of social people whose descendants have a colorful, cultured and historical heritage that has been handed across more than a hundred years of early Arkansas frontier history.

Beyond the Little Red River beside Pangburn, early settlers from Tennessee pushed on through Tupelo Pond to Little Red’s rising ridge, where faithful oxen finally pulled the wagons up to a last great campground of an Osage Indian tribe. The abandoned wigwams sheltered the settlers for nights; a hamlet grew, and they named it Hiram. Later, from fear of chills and fevers, they moved Hiram about one mile northwardly to the land upon Hiram Bluff.

During the dawning years of the century, Hiram grew to a community church for all faiths, a public grade school, a Masonic hall, five general stores, a lumber company, a water mill on Big Creek, a barber shop and a blacksmith shop. And on May 29, 1909, Hiram was surveyed and platted to be a town. The plat shows five town blocks, with First, Second, Third, Main and Bluff streets.

After the first passenger train of the late M&NA Railroad made her maiden run over into the valley, almost all the people of Hiram moved to Pangburn. They wanted to be beside the railroad.

 

Some early family names at Hiram were Babbit, Barnett, Boozer, Brooks, Brown, Crook, Coffee, Davis, Floyd, Hays, Hawley, Henderson, Landrum, Lowery, Manning, Matthews, McCauley, Nowell, Pangburn, Peeler, Sandefur, Shearer, Taylor, Tole, Vinson, Yount and Wilcox. Most families traded at nearby Pangburn. The all-day trip to Heber Springs was made only in spring and fall. Originally a part of White County, Hiram is now in Cleburne County.