Volume 10 , Issue 19

Sod Town, Beaver Co., OK

Some NW Oklahoma ghost towns can have wild, interesting legacies that still haunt parts of "No Man's Land (Oklahoma Panhandle)." One of those ghost towns is Sod Town, in Beaver County, the first county you come to when you enter the Oklahoma Panhandle from the East.

Sod Town is located in Sec. 22-1N-26E, Cimarron Meridian, 19 miles south, 15 miles East of Beaver. Sod Town was unique among the early settlements of the Panhandle. It was the first town to be built in the eastern part of "No Man's Land," and all of the buildings were constructed of blue creek sod.

The village was described as "standing irregularly and nakedly on the prairie." It had one store, Blacksmith shop, two saloons with pool halls, restaurant, a shack that served as a school. Doors and windowsills were unpainted and often broken, refuse littered the space between buildings, and building interiors were little more than dark, bad-smelling rooms.

The town was noted for the characters -- horse theives and badmen -- who loafed around the saloons. Most of the Chitwood gang, notorious horse thieves who lived nearby and frequented the saloons and were eventually hanged by vigilantes. However, the thieves would not steal from neighbors who treated them in a friendly manner.

Harry Parker, who as a pioneer youngster attended school in Sod Town, once said, "I do not recall the name of my first teacher in No Man's Land, but I do remember that two or three of the older students carried six-shooters to school. They would remove them and hang them on the wall by their hats."

Sod Town, spawned in poverty and crime, has passed into oblivion leaving only the ghosts and haunts of the past as its legacy. The land where the town stood has been cultivated for a number of years, but the ruins of old sod buildings have left ridges that can still be seen from the road east of it." -- Ghosttowns of Oklahoma, by John W. Morris, page 180.
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