Cleveland, Oklahoma history: the state's first oil boom town
Cleveland has about 3,300 people now. In 1930 it had almost as many, and for a stretch in between it was one of the more consequential spots in Oklahoma. Most people who live here do not know that, and it is a better story than the town gets credit for.
It started with the Cherokee Outlet
The Cherokee Outlet opened to settlement on September 16, 1893. Before that opening, John W. Jordan and other Cherokee had taken allotments in the outlet.
Soon after, Jordan and others formed the Jordan Valley Townsite Company and bought land for a townsite from a Cherokee man named Dave Hendrix.
The town that got renamed
A nearby homesteader, Willis H. Herbert, moved faster. He established a town called Herbert, and its post office opened on October 28, 1893.
Then the post office moved one hundred feet, and on April 14, 1894 it was renamed Cleveland after Grover Cleveland, then President of the United States.
One hundred feet. That is the distance between this town being called Herbert and being called Cleveland, and it is also why anyone searching for restaurants here has to fight Ohio for the results.
July 2, 1904
The Lowery No. 1 came in just south of town.
It opened what became known as the Cleveland Sand, and it made Cleveland Oklahoma's first oil boom town. Not one of the first. The first.
Oklahoma was still three years from statehood. The oil industry that would define the state's economy for the next century had one of its earliest booms right here, on the south side of the Arkansas River in Pawnee County.
What the boom did to the town
The population climbed to 2,717 by 1920 and 2,959 by 1930.
That is worth sitting with. Cleveland's population today, in 2026, is around 3,284. The town is barely larger than it was ninety years ago. The boom brought people, the boom ended, and the town settled into roughly the size it has held ever since.
Why the geography made sense
Cleveland sits at the junction of US Highway 64 and State Highway 99, on the south side of the Arkansas River, about 25 miles east of Pawnee and 35 miles west of Tulsa.
That river position mattered a great deal more before Keystone Dam. The lake that now defines recreation here is a relatively recent addition to a landscape that was, for most of the town's history, about the river and what was under the ground near it.
What is left of it
Not a great deal that announces itself. This is not a town with a preserved boomtown district or a museum built around 1904. What you get instead is a downtown grid laid out during a period when the town expected to be bigger, and the general sense, walking Kaw Avenue, that the place was built for more people than currently live in it.
Pawnee Bill Ranch, 25 minutes northwest in Pawnee, is the nearest place that does the historical interpretation properly, though it tells a different story: Gordon "Pawnee Bill" Lillie and the Wild West show era rather than oil.
Why any of this matters if you live here
Mostly it does not, in the practical sense. But it explains a few things you notice.
It explains why the street grid is larger than the population needs. It explains the age of a lot of the housing stock. And it explains why a town of 3,300 has the infrastructure it does, which is to say more than a town of 3,300 would build from scratch today.
Cleveland peaked, then held. There are worse outcomes for an Oklahoma oil town, and plenty of places on the map that did not manage it.
Looking for an apartment in Cleveland, Oklahoma? Serenity Ridge offers one and two bedroom apartments at 107 E Kaw Ave, walking distance to downtown and about ten minutes from Keystone Lake. See floor plans · Schedule a tour · 918-727-8622
