Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Clinton Clinton, OK

Clinton is a city in Custer and Washita counties in western Oklahoma that calls itself the Hub City of Western Oklahoma.

The town began in 1899 as Washita Junction, when J. L. Avant and E. E. Blake bought 80-acre parcels from four Native allotment holders, Hays, Shoe-Boy, Nowahy and Night Killer, for $2,000 each to start a townsite in the Washita River valley.

After a townsite sale on June 3-6, 1903, the settlement took the name Clinton for Judge Clinton F. Irwin, because the postal department would not accept the name Washita Junction.

Clinton grew up at a rare railroad crossroads, served by three railroads, and from 1909 to 1915 it even ran its own Clinton Street Railway trolley between its two depots before a fatal 1914 collision with a switch engine ended the line.

U.S. Route 66 made Clinton a tourist town of cafes, motels and filling stations; Pop Hicks Restaurant, which opened in 1936, was once the longest-running restaurant on all of Route 66 before it burned in 1999.

The U.S. Highway 66 Association, the national group that promoted the Mother Road, was revived after World War II and headquartered in Clinton from 1947 until it disbanded in the 1980s.

Clinton is home to the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum, the first state-sponsored Route 66 museum in the nation, operated by the Oklahoma Historical Society on the historic highway.

Dr. Walter S. Mason Jr.'s Best Western motel in Clinton hosted Elvis Presley as an occasional guest during the 1960s.

In 1942 the Navy built Naval Air Station Clinton near Burns Flat; the field later became Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base, a Strategic Air Command base flying B-52 Stratofortress bombers, and after its 1969 closure the 3,500-acre complex became the Clinton-Sherman Industrial Airpark.

Clinton had 8,521 residents at the 2020 census, down from a peak of 10,359 in 1970, and the census counted 3,065 households.