Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in North Miami, OK

North Miami is a small town in Ottawa County in the far northeastern corner of Oklahoma, four miles north of Miami on U.S. Highway 69 — a namesake of the Florida city, but a tiny mining-era town rather than a beach metropolis.

The town sits roughly on the old boundary between the lands the federal government assigned to the Quapaw tribe to the north and the Peoria tribe to the south.

North Miami received its postal designation in 1915, with Sarah Dennis serving as postmaster, after the name had briefly been used by Commerce's first post office in 1914.

The town grew as housing for the Tri-State district's lead and zinc miners, and the Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri Inter-Urban Railway, built through town in 1908-09, carried workers to Commerce and the other mining camps.

North Miami's population stood at 483 in 1920 and peaked at 544 in 1980, before the region's mining economy faded.

The area lies within a federal Environmental Protection Agency Superfund cleanup program that the government initiated in 1983, a legacy of the lead and zinc mining era.

North Miami is essentially a bedroom community for larger Ottawa County towns — in 2000 nearly 94 percent of its working residents commuted to jobs elsewhere, most of them less than fifteen minutes away.

The 2020 census counted 290 people in North Miami, down from 433 people in 169 households in 2000, packed into just 0.19 square miles.

Despite sitting in Oklahoma, North Miami is part of the Joplin, Missouri metropolitan area.