Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Fairland, OK

Fairland is a town in southern Ottawa County, bisected by U.S. Highway 60 and State Highway 125, in the historic Cherokee Nation; it is part of the Joplin, Missouri metropolitan area.

Fairland was laid out along the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway (Frisco) tracks built from Missouri to Vinita in 1871, on an original plat of 225 acres settled by families moving in from the Prairie Springs area.

Fairland's post office opened in 1891, and the town was an active farming community by the time Oklahoma became a state in 1907.

A second railroad, the Missouri, Oklahoma and Gulf Railway (later the Kansas, Oklahoma and Gulf), built through Fairland in 1912 and crossed the older Frisco line, giving the small town two railroads.

Fairland's population stood at 499 in 1900 and peaked in that era at 818 in 1920.

Agriculture was Fairland's mainstay until the end of World War II, when the B. F. Goodrich tire plant opened near Miami in 1945 and became the major employer for Fairland workers; the plant closed permanently in February 1985.

The 2020 census counted 1,106 residents in Fairland, up from 1,057 in 2010, continuing a century of hovering around 1,000 people.

In the 2000 census, Fairland's 1,025 residents lived in 415 households in a town of just 0.9 square miles.

Fairland's school serves the larger surrounding countryside and had an enrollment of 506 students in 2000, several times what the town's size alone would suggest.

Fairland was the birthplace of Lloyd Kiva New (1916–2002), the Cherokee fashion designer who co-founded the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.