Biohazard Cleanup Near North Dougherty Dougherty, OK

Dougherty is a tiny town in southern Murray County, Oklahoma, tucked into the Washita River valley in the Arbuckle Mountains.

The community was first known as Henderson Flat, and later Strawberry Flat, before being renamed for William Dougherty, a banker from Gainesville, Texas.

The Thomas W. Johnson family acquired the present townsite in 1880, reportedly buying the land from a Chickasaw medicine man for $200.

The Santa Fe Railroad reached Dougherty in 1887, and its post office — at first just a boxcar on a siding — was officially established on September 3, 1887.

Dougherty incorporated in 1899 as a community of Tishomingo County in the Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory.

Mining made Dougherty boom far beyond its size: about 550 workers were extracting asphalt from area mines in 1895, and between the early 1920s and mid-1940s local operations produced more than a million tons of sand and gravel and three million tons of rock asphalt.

Dougherty had the first telephone system in Murray County, which went into service in 1901 with its switchboard in the lobby of the McCollum Hotel.

The remains of the Dolese Brothers limestone quarry at Big Canyon can still be seen near Dougherty, once one of the region's biggest employers.

Dougherty's population peaked at 464 in 1940 and had fallen to 199 by the 2020 census.

Like a number of Oklahoma towns of its era, Dougherty was a sundown town as of 1900, where African Americans were not permitted to live.