Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Ames Ames, OK

Ames is a town in southeastern Major County, Oklahoma, founded at the opening of the Cherokee Outlet on September 16, 1893.

The town was initially named Hoyle, for a nearby creek, and was renamed on January 4, 1902 for Henry S. Ames, a railroad official.

Ames sits inside the boundary of the Ames crater, also called the Ames Astrobleme — a meteor impact structure about eight miles wide buried under some 9,000 feet of sediment just north of town.

The crater was blasted out by a meteor strike hundreds of millions of years ago, but it went unrecognized until oil was discovered within it in 1991.

The Ames crater is one of only six oil-producing meteor impact craters in the United States, and by 2007 it had yielded about 17.4 million barrels of oil and 79.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

The Ames Astrobleme Museum opened in town on August 18, 2007; the small unstaffed museum is open 24 hours a day and explains the crater's formation through image panels and video.

Ames celebrates its buried crater each year during Ames Day, a community celebration that raises funds for the local volunteer fire department.

Three large murals painted on downtown buildings depict scenes from Ames' past, including the first town meeting and views of historic Main Street.

By 1918 Ames supported two banks, two grain mills, two general stores, a weekly newspaper, a hotel, a theater, a pharmacy and a hardware store.

Ames' population peaked at 332 in the 1940 census and was 193 at the 2020 census.