Hext, Oklahoma: A Post Office That Lasted Eighteen Months

Between Sayre and Erick on the old alignment, Hext barely had time to be a town. It was established in nineteen oh one, named for a local resident named William Hext, and given a post office on June fourth of that year. The post office closed November twenty-ninth, nineteen oh two, a year and a half after it opened.

The railroad siding brought a brief trickle of activity, but the land here was farm and ranch country that never supported more than a handful of families. Route sixty-six was realigned through Hext in nineteen twenty-nine, and this stretch held its designation longer than almost any other section of sixty-six, not yielding to Interstate forty until nineteen seventy-five. Today a collapsing school and a Baptist church mark the spot, along with an old stone filling station whose service bay was converted into a house after the pumps came out.

Hext is the kind of place the highway passed through without really stopping.