Texola, Oklahoma

Texola sits right on the hundredth meridian, the surveyed line that divides eastern and western America, and for years nobody could agree whether the town belonged to Oklahoma or Texas. The community was surveyed eight separate times before the boundary was settled. A post office opened in December nineteen oh one, and the town went by several names including Texokla and Texoma before landing on Texola, a blend of Texas and Oklahoma.

Cotton farming and Route Sixty-Six brought the town to its peak in the nineteen thirties, when nearly six hundred people lived here and four cotton gins ran at capacity. Then the Dust Bowl hit, cotton prices collapsed from thirty-five cents to under ten cents a pound, and Interstate Forty bypassed the town entirely. Today Texola has roughly forty residents.

A stone jail built in nineteen ten and a nineteen thirty Magnolia Service Station still stand along the old alignment, quiet landmarks of a town the highway left behind.