24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Ingalls, OK

Ingalls is a census-designated place in eastern Payne County, about 9 miles east of Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Ingalls was founded during Oklahoma's first land run into the Unassigned Lands on April 22, 1889, by Dr. Robert F. McMurtry and Robert Beal, and named for Kansas Senator John J. Ingalls, who helped pass the legislation opening the territory.

In the early 1890s Ingalls became a favorite hideout of Bill Doolin's Doolin-Dalton Gang, also called the Wild Bunch or Oklahombres, who lived at the town hotel and drank at the Ransom Saloon between bank and train robberies.

On September 1, 1893, deputy U.S. marshals who had slipped into town in covered wagons fought the Battle of Ingalls, one of the most famous gunfights of the Old West; three deputy marshals and two townspeople were killed, and every outlaw escaped except Arkansas Tom Jones, who was captured in the hotel.

Bill Doolin had secretly married Edith Ellsworth, the Ingalls postmaster's daughter, while using the town as his gang's headquarters.

Ingalls had roughly 150 to 230 residents in its 1890s heyday, but it faded after its post office closed in 1907 and no longer appears on Oklahoma state highway maps.

The U.S. Census Bureau counted 192 people in the Ingalls CDP at the 2020 census, spread over about 2.6 square miles.

Today only a few buildings, stone foundations and a stone memorial erected in 1938 to the fallen lawmen mark the site of the famous gunfight.

Ingalls shares Stillwater's ZIP code, 74074, and its residents are served by Payne County's seat, where Oklahoma State University is located.