Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Oakwood, OK

Oakwood is a small incorporated town in eastern Dewey County in northwestern Oklahoma, on State Highway 3 and U.S. Highways 270/281 about twenty miles southeast of Seiling.

Oakwood grew on land opened to homesteaders in 1892, when the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation was opened to settlement and farmers began raising wheat and livestock on the plains around the Canadian River.

After the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway built through Dewey County in 1902, the Union Real Estate and Townsite Company bought the site and in May 1903 surveyed and platted a fifty-block town.

Local settlers chose the name Oakwood because of the oak trees growing nearby, passing over the alternative name Edsallville, which honored a prominent local family.

Oakwood incorporated in 1909; an unofficial census a year earlier had already counted 200 people, and the 1910 federal census recorded 199 residents.

At its peak of 266 residents in 1930, Oakwood supported thirty-five businesses along with Christian and Methodist churches.

The Great Depression and World War II hollowed Oakwood out: only 122 people remained by 1960, and by 1974 the once-bustling town was down to five businesses.

The 2020 census counted 74 residents in Oakwood — up from 65 in 2010, the town's first census-to-census population increase since the 1970s.

In the 2000 census, Oakwood's 72 residents lived in just 35 households within the town's compact 0.23 square miles.

Oakwood celebrated its centennial in July 2003, one hundred years after its townsite was platted, with festivities organized around its surviving community institutions.