Biohazard Cleanup Near Guymon Historic District Guymon, OK

Guymon is the county seat of Texas County and the largest city in the Oklahoma Panhandle, sitting on the High Plains at an elevation of about 3,124 feet.

The town began when land promoter Edward T. E.T. Guymon bought a section of land west of the Beaver River in the 1890s, and it boomed after the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway arrived in 1901.

First named Sanford by the Post Office Department, the town was renamed Guymon a month later to avoid confusion with Stratford, Texas, and it incorporated in 1901.

When Oklahoma became a state in 1907, Guymon, with 839 residents, was named seat of the newly created Texas County, today the second-largest county in Oklahoma by land area.

Guymon endured the Dust Bowl, and old-time residents still recall Black Sunday, April 14, 1935, as the day of the worst dust storm in the area's history.

Discovery of the nearby Hugoton-Panhandle gas field, one of the largest natural gas fields in the world, created new jobs and pushed Guymon's population to 2,290 by 1940.

Guymon had 12,965 residents at the 2020 census, up 13.3% from 11,442 in 2010, and accounts for more than half of Texas County's population.

The 2020 census counted 4,325 households in Guymon with an unusually large average household size of 3.28 persons.

Guymon was the only municipality in Oklahoma where a majority of the population was Hispanic in both the 2010 and 2020 censuses, with Hispanic or Latino residents making up 58.5% of the city in 2020.

The city's largest employer, the Seaboard pork processing plant, runs double shifts processing about 18,000 hogs a day with roughly 2,300 employees, about 20% of the city's entire population.