Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in Adamson, OK

Adamson is a ghost town and census-designated place in Pittsburg County, Oklahoma, located between McAlester and Wilburton, about 10 miles east of McAlester and 6 miles north of Hartshorne.

Adamson was named for Peter Adamson, a mine owner, and a post office was established there on March 1, 1906, when the area was still part of the Choctaw Nation's Moshulatubbee District.

Adamson began as a coal-mining camp around the turn of the twentieth century and grew into a boomtown containing 15 coal mines, four of them major producers.

At its World War I peak, Adamson's population reached about 3,500, and from 1913 to 1919 its mines worked around the clock, shipping coal out on spurs built by both the Rock Island and Katy railroads.

On September 4, 1914, Adamson was the site of one of the worst coal mine disasters in the United States, when Mine No. 1 began to collapse and fourteen miners were trapped at the lowest level and buried as the entire mine caved in.

The ground above the collapsed Mine No. 1 sank between 8 and 10 feet, and neither rescue nor recovery of the fourteen miners' bodies was possible.

Anthony Benedict, the last man to come out of Mine No. 1 before it completely collapsed, later built a monument on his farm honoring the miners who died.

Adamson never recovered economically from the disaster and the decline of coal, and much of the old townsite has since been engulfed by Eufaula Lake, Oklahoma's largest lake.

By 1957, Adamson had dwindled to about ten houses and two small grocery stores serving visitors to nearby Eufaula Lake, and all of its mines had closed and filled with water.

The 2020 census counted just 69 people in Adamson, living in 29 households with a median age of 39.6 years — a small remnant of the thousands who once lived in the coal camp — and the area is zoned to Hartshorne Public Schools.