Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Kaw City, OK

Kaw City is a city in eastern Kay County, Oklahoma, named for the Kanza Indians, whom locals called the Kaw.

The original Kaw City was founded in 1902, before statehood, as a farming community in a fertile oxbow bend of the Arkansas River, across the river from the Kaw Indian reservation and the Kaw Agency.

By Oklahoma statehood in 1907 the town had 486 inhabitants, and it boomed after oil was discovered nearby in 1919, jumping from 627 people in 1920 to 1,001 in 1930.

The old town had a popular four-story hotel holding one of the world's rarest art collections, assembled by Laura A. Clubb, who later donated the collection to the Philbrook Art Museum in Tulsa.

A flood overwhelmed most of Kaw City in 1923, and the Great Depression devastated it again a few years later.

Kaw City is one of the few American towns that was picked up and moved — in the late 1960s residents relocated the whole community about two miles west to a hilltop after the Army Corps of Engineers built Kaw Dam, and the original townsite went permanently underwater when Kaw Lake filled in 1976.

The first house in the new Kaw City was built in the summer of 1969, and the first mail was delivered there on June 26, 1972; when Kaw Lake is exceptionally low, foundations of the old town can still be seen above the water.

Many buildings were hauled to the new site, including the 1903 Santa Fe Railroad depot, which now houses the Kaw City Museum and is one of only two National Register-listed structures in Oklahoma that were moved from their original locations.

Today's Kaw City sits on a peninsula extending into Kaw Lake, a roughly 17,000-acre reservoir that is one of the largest lakes in Oklahoma, and more than half of the city's total area is water.

The 2020 census counted 325 people in Kaw City living in 149 households, with a notably old median age of 55.5 years and 32 percent of residents aged 65 or older.