Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Fort Supply, OK

Fort Supply is a small town in Woodward County, about 13 miles northwest of the county seat of Woodward, and it takes its name from a frontier Army post established a mile east of the townsite.

The Army founded the post on November 18, 1868, as Camp Supply, the supply base for General Philip Sheridan's winter campaign against the Southern Plains tribes; it was from here that Custer's Seventh Cavalry marched to the Battle of the Washita a week later.

The camp was renamed Fort Supply in December 1878 and operated until it closed in September 1894.

The town itself was founded in 1903 as simply "Supply" by territorial legislator James P. Gandy, who platted the townsite and moved in most of the buildings from the recently failed town of Fitzgerald; its first post office opened on May 12, 1903.

The town did not take the name Fort Supply until May 1, 1943, when residents changed the name of both the town and its post office.

In 1908 the derelict Army post became Western Oklahoma Hospital, the first state-operated mental institution in Oklahoma; its successor, the Western State Psychiatric Center, and the William S. Key Correctional Center on the old post grounds remain pillars of the local economy alongside farming and ranching.

The Fort Supply Historic District, covering the old post, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.

Fort Supply had 783 residents at statehood in 1907, and its population peaked in the modern era at 559 in 1980; the 2020 census counted 317 people in the town.

Just southeast of town, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers manages Fort Supply Lake and its surrounding wildlife and recreation area on Wolf Creek, authorized under the Flood Control Act of 1936.