Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Yale, OK

Yale is a city in Payne County, Oklahoma, founded in 1895 when local farmer Sterling F. Underwood established a post office in his general store on land that had been part of the Pawnee Reservation.

In 1902 Underwood moved his store to a new townsite beside the Eastern Oklahoma Railway, and that railroad site became the permanent location of Yale, about 20 miles east of Stillwater on State Highway 51.

Yale was a quiet farming and cotton-processing town of 685 people in 1910 before an oil well on the Randle farm blew in as a gusher on September 23, 1913, and an even bigger discovery followed a month later on the farm of Sarah Rector, a ten-year-old African American orphan whose oil income soon reached about $1,100 a month.

At the height of the boom, the combined Yale and Cushing oil fields were reportedly producing 220,000 barrels a day by the end of 1914, and fourteen refineries operated around Yale.

Yale's population peaked at 2,601 in the 1920 census, then fell steadily as the oil field declined, dropping to 1,734 by 1930.

The 2020 census counted 1,059 people in Yale living in 427 households, and about 59% of its occupied homes were owner-occupied.

Yale's motto is "Home of Jim Thorpe" — the Olympic champion lived in Yale from 1917 to 1923, and the Jim Thorpe House, listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1971, is now a museum owned by the Thorpe family.

Legendary jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker was born in Yale in 1929.

Yale operates under a council-manager form of government, unusual for a town of its size, and draws its water supply from Lone Chimney Lake.

The whole city covers only about 0.9 square miles, and town officials have promoted Yale as a retirement community to slow its long population decline.