Cromwell is in Seminole
County, pretty much in the center of the state. Most of the town is south of
Oklahoma Highway 99A, but the city limits stretch north along either side of Oklahoma
Highway 56, extending just north of Interstate 40.
A Valero convenience store
sits near the interstate, so one might gather the city annexed the north-south
area along Highway 56 in order to take in land at the interstate, on which more
name brand businesses might set stakes.
In that way, the intersection
of interstate highway and state highway would look like every other similar
intersection along every other intestate. You get the same fast food places,
the same gasoline/convenience stores. Little boxes made of ticky tacky, as
Malvina Reynolds wrote in 1962.
Cromwell was founded in 1923
and named for oilman Joe I. Cromwell. The town was a boomtown, with all the physical
and moral blight that goes with the term.
“Virtually overnight during the roaring '20s,
Cromwell's population went from zero to 10,000, becoming a lusty oil boom town
of shacks, tents, brothels, bars and gamblers. Just as quickly, it shrunk back
into obscurity.”
Cromwell might have had 10,000 people in 1923, but the population dwindled to 249 at the 1930 federal census. The largest population ever was 451
in 1940. The 2010 census has 286 people living there. Fifteen percent of
families and 20 percent of the total population live below the poverty line.
In 1924 the town hired famed lawman Bill
Tilghman to bring law and order to Cromwell. Tilghman was 70 years old when
gunned down by a corrupt federal revenue agent named Wiley Lynn on Nov. 1,
1924.
“One month later the
town of Cromwell was torched, with every brothel, bar, flop house and pool hall
burned to the ground, allegedly by friends of Tilghman. There was no investigation
into the massive fire, and Cromwell never recovered its former wild status, or
size.”
The 2000 census showed
84 men for every 100 women and 84.3 men for each woman age 18 and over.
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