Most of McNab was built recently: 5% of its homes predate 1940 and the median home dates from 1975. Below: maps from 1951 on and the census since 1910.
In 1860, Charles McNab, who had emigrated to the United States in 1841 from Muthill, Perthshire, Scotland, bought land in the Red River valley not far from the town of Fulton. McNab, a carpenter, had married into a plantation-owning family in Alabama which later sold their Alabama land and moved to property at Summer Grove, near Shreveport, Louisiana. Though the Arkansas property was acquired by him in 1860, the Civil War prevented McNab from cultivating his new property. After the war, in 1865, he came up and planted cotton there. Soon, he and his wife and young son, together with a number of newly freed slaves, moved from Louisiana to live on and work the new farm. When the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway (Frisco) came through the area 30 years later, a small passenger and freight station was built, and a post office to serve the small community was set up across the road in the back …
Founding dates: Wikidata, Wikipedia, the U.S. post office records of Blevins & Helbock (CC0) and the Census. Homes by year built: Census ACS 2020–24. National Register of Historic Places: National Park Service (list of May 22, 2026). Old photos, postcards and papers: Wikimedia Commons, the Library of Congress and other public archives, credited on each item’s page. Maps: U.S. Geological Survey historical topographic maps (via Esri) and Sanborn fire-insurance maps (Library of Congress). History text and census tables: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Places that used to be: USGS Geographic Names Information System (2021). How TownRatings grades history →
From Wikipedia, U.S. Geological Survey historical maps, U.S. Census counts (via Wikipedia), the US Post Offices dataset (Blevins & Helbock) and the USGS Geographic Names Information System. Archive images are copied here with their credits and licenses, shown on each photo’s page. Refreshed monthly.
