24/7 Biohazard and Crime Scene Cleanup in Boley, OK

Boley is a town in Okfuskee County that was founded in 1903 and incorporated on May 10, 1905, as an all-Black pioneer town in the Creek Nation of Indian Territory.

Boley was established on land allotted to Abigail Barnett, the daughter of Creek freedman James Barnett, and was organized by its first townsite manager, Thomas M. Haynes.

The town was named for J. B. Boley, a Fort Smith and Western Railway official who had argued that Black people were capable of governing themselves.

Boley is the largest and best known of the more than fifty all-Black towns founded in Oklahoma, and one of only thirteen that still exist.

By 1911 Boley had more than 4,000 residents and boasted two banks - including the first nationally chartered Black-owned bank in the United States - three cotton gins, its own electric company, and two colleges, the Creek-Seminole College and the Methodist Episcopal College.

Booker T. Washington visited Boley in 1905 and praised it in his speeches, and George Washington Carver once called Boley "the most progressive black town in the U.S."

In November 1932, Boley's armed citizens foiled a robbery of the Farmers and Merchants Bank by members of Pretty Boy Floyd's gang, killing two of the robbers.

The Boley Historic District, covering the downtown business district, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1975.

Boley hosts the annual Boley Rodeo & Bar-B-Que Festival every Memorial Day weekend, described as the nation's oldest African American community-based rodeo.

Boley had 1,091 residents at the 2020 census but only 82 households, because much of the counted population consists of inmates at the John H. Lilley Correctional Center located in the town.