24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Clayton, OK

Clayton is a town in northern Pushmataha County, set in the Kiamichi River valley at the junction of U.S. Highway 271 and State Highway 2, about 36 miles north of the county seat, Antlers.

Clayton began in the Choctaw Nation, Indian Territory, under the name Dexter, where a post office was established on March 31, 1894 and named for early resident Dexter Chapman.

The town developed as a lumber mill town along the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway, which built its line through the Choctaw Nation in 1886–87.

On April 5, 1907 the post office name changed from Dexter to Clayton — the name is thought to come either from Clayton, Missouri, or from William H. H. Clayton, the federal judge who played a prominent role in Oklahoma's path to statehood.

Clayton is the largest town in northern Pushmataha County and serves as the region's largest trading center, largely because of its distance from Antlers.

The first federal census of Clayton, in 1950, counted 612 residents, and the population peaked at 833 in 1980.

The 2020 census counted 555 people in Clayton living in 251 households, with a median age of 43.8 years, and about 23 percent of residents identifying as American Indian.

The Clayton High School auditorium is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as an unusual example of WPA architecture — one of only two known single-use auditoriums built by the Works Progress Administration.

Flagpole Mountain, which rises west of Clayton, still retains a metal fire lookout tower — the only fire tower remaining in Pushmataha County.

Clayton is a gateway to outdoor recreation in the Kiamichi Mountains, with Clayton Lake State Park in its pine forest to the south, the Corps of Engineers' Sardis Lake to the northwest, and the Pushmataha Wildlife Management Area nearby.