24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Verden, OK

Verden is a small town in western Grady County, hard against the Caddo County line, lying nearly halfway between Chickasha and Anadarko on U.S. Highway 62/State Highway 9.

Verden is probably best known as the site of the 1865 Camp Napoleon Council, a major meeting of Plains tribes held near the end of the Civil War.

Before the town existed, a rural community called Cottonwood Grove emerged near the site before the Civil War, on the eastern edge of the Kiowa and Comanche reservation established by the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867.

The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad built tracks through the area in 1900, and the town of Verden was platted in 1904, with lots sold by A. A. Hiatt for the railroad's townsite division.

Verden was incorporated in 1907 by the commissioners of Caddo County in Oklahoma Territory with 312 residents, and it became part of Grady County when Oklahoma became a state later that year.

By 1910 Verden's population had climbed to 524 and the town supported two banks, the Verden News newspaper, a telephone system, an electric company, a grain elevator, a cotton yard, a cotton gin, a milling company and a lumberyard.

Verden's public school opened in 1905 and later absorbed a neighboring Caddo County district.

Unlike many Oklahoma boom-and-bust towns, Verden's population stayed between four hundred and five hundred people for most of the twentieth century; it peaked at 659 in 2000 and the 2020 census counted about 509 residents.

Agriculture has remained Verden's main economic activity since its founding, and the railroad long made it an important shipping point for area farms and ranches.

The whole town of Verden covers just 0.33 square miles.