24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Optima, OK

Optima is an incorporated town in Texas County in the Oklahoma Panhandle, located about nine miles northeast of Guymon, the county seat, on U.S. Route 54.

Optima began in the 1880s as a settlement in the Public Land Strip — the "No Man's Land" panhandle — and, like the other early towns there, it moved to its present site when the railroad arrived.

Developers laid out the present town of Optima in 1901 as the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad was extended across Texas County, the same building campaign that created Hooker, Guymon, Goodwell and Texhoma.

Four carbon black plants operated near Optima from the mid-1930s through the 1940s, using natural gas from the giant Hugoton-Panhandle gas field that underlies the region.

Just east of Optima is the Stamper Site, also called the Optima Site, a National Historic Landmark preserving an Antelope Creek culture village of 28 single-room dwellings dating to around A.D. 1400.

The 2020 census counted 338 residents in Optima living in 103 households, and more than 60 percent of those households had children under the age of 18 living in them.

Optima is one of the youngest communities in the Panhandle: its median age in the 2020 census was just 27.5 years, and 31.4 percent of its residents were under 18.

About 77.8 percent of Optima's residents identified as Hispanic or Latino in the 2020 census, a reflection of the agricultural and meatpacking workforce of the Guymon area.

Optima's population nearly tripled between 1990 and 2000 (from 92 to 266) and peaked at 356 in the 2010 census, after decades in which it had never topped 133.

The Beaver River runs about two miles south of Optima and flows into Optima Lake, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reservoir about nine miles southeast of town.