Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Gene Autry, OK

Gene Autry is a small incorporated town in eastern Carter County, about seventeen miles northeast of Ardmore on State Highway 53, and it is part of the Ardmore micropolitan area.

The community began as a store opened in the 1870s in Pickens County of the Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory, and its first post office was established on July 11, 1883, under the name Lou, chosen by proprietor C. C. Henderson for his wife.

The town changed names repeatedly: Lou became Dresden in November 1883, and when the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway bypassed Dresden in 1887, residents moved to the tracks and renamed the townsite Berwyn, after Berwyn, Pennsylvania — one of several stations on the line named for towns on Philadelphia's Main Line.

As Berwyn, the town developed into a farming center with cotton gins, a grain elevator, a feed mill and its own newspaper, the Berwyn Light, reaching a peak population of 435 in 1920.

In 1939 the singing cowboy film star Gene Autry bought the 1,200-acre Flying A Ranch on the west edge of Berwyn to serve as headquarters for his traveling rodeo.

To honor their famous neighbor, residents petitioned to rename the town, and on November 16, 1941 — Oklahoma's 34th Statehood Day — Berwyn officially became Gene Autry before a crowd estimated at 35,000 people.

In 1990 the town converted its old school building, built by the Works Progress Administration in 1937, into the Gene Autry Oklahoma Museum, dedicated to Gene Autry and the singing cowboys of B Western films.

Gene Autry's population has shrunk from its 1920s peak to just 154 residents in the 2020 census, down slightly from 158 in 2010.