Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Commerce Commerce, OK

Commerce is a city in Ottawa County in far northeastern Oklahoma, five miles north of Miami on U.S. Highway 69, the road that was once historic Route 66.

Commerce was named for the Commerce Mining and Royalty Company, which platted the town in 1914 on land that had been part of the Quapaw Indian Agency, and it was incorporated as a city on March 5, 1915.

Commerce was the first town travelers reached on Route 66 in Oklahoma after crossing the Kansas border heading west, when the highway was commissioned in 1926.

Baseball legend Mickey Mantle grew up in Commerce after his father moved the family there in 1935 to work in the mines, and he earned his famous nickname, "the Commerce Comet," playing for Commerce High School, where he graduated in 1949.

Mantle's restored boyhood home at 319 South Quincy Street, complete with the tin barn where he practiced hitting, is a pilgrimage site for baseball fans, and a statue of Mantle was installed in 2010 behind the center-field wall at the high school field.

On April 6, 1934, Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow and their associate Henry Methvin killed Commerce constable William Calvin Campbell and kidnapped the town's police chief, Percy Boyd; the state funded a monument to Campbell in 2000.

Commerce's population has stayed remarkably steady for a century: it counted 2,555 residents in 1920 and 2,271 in the 2020 census.

Most of Commerce's lead and zinc mines had closed by 1960 because of a declining market and the recognition of extensive environmental damage to the area's ground, water and air.

Commerce's motto is "Home of the Tigers," after the Commerce High School teams.

Commerce native Conrad Caldwell, who wrestled at Oklahoma State University under Ed Gallagher, is honored in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.