HOOT OWL, Okla. — It turns out it’s not all that easy for a town to become extinct.
Its last two full-time residents are believed to have moved away 18 years ago. But the Mayes County town of Hoot Owl still lives as Oklahoma’s smallest incorporated community, becoming a zombie town of sorts.
Incorporated in 1977 by a family of three, its population peaked at 5 in 1990, but then dropped to zero in April 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Later in 2000, the Census Bureau inexplicably increased the population to “1,” where it’s been holding steady every year since.
Finding the one resident of Hoot Owl, which is about 81 miles west of Fayetteville, that the Census Bureau says lives there is about as easy as finding the town itself.
Don’t look for it on a state of Oklahoma map. It won’t be found. And there are no signs in Mayes County directing one to the town of Hoot Owl.
Internet-based mapping services indicate the town is accessed via Hoot Owl Road, off Oklahoma 20. But no street signs marking Hoot Owl Road exist.
The narrow, dead-end road leading to Lake Hudson and to Hoot Owl is designated simply as No. 443.5.
Folks in the area usuallyjust smile when someone asks them about Hoot Owl.
“I’ve had a lot of people ask me where Hoot Owl was,” said Ray Plumlee, who jokes that he lives in a suburb of Hoot Owl.
Plumlee, who lives off Highway 20 just east of Salina, has been giving directions to the “town” for several years.
Plumlee recalls a sign once welcomed drivers to Hoot Owl, but the sign is long gone, he says.
Today, many locals have never heard of the town, said Plumlee, a World War II veteran known as “Blackie” for his once jet-black hair.
The town was born in 1977, when William R. Bradley Jr., his wife and son incorporated their 36-acre property to keep trespassing hunters andother towns from encroaching on their land, according to a Tulsa Tribune story from that time.
But by 1992, a bank foreclosure prompted Bradley, then a widower, to file an application with, well, himself, to start proceedings to dissolve the town, according to Oklahoma Secretary of State records.
“The application stated the reason for the request was that the two registered voters were 100 percent of the population and that in a short time they would be moving, leaving no inhabitants to carry on the business of the town,” according to Secretary of State records.
The only two residents of the town, Bradley, the mayor, and his son, Robert, the town clerk, both voted yes on the question, “Shall the Town of Hoot Owl be dissolved?” records show.
But the bank that foreclosed on the property went to court to challenge the move to kill the town.
A Mayes County District Court in 1993 ruled in favor of the bank, voiding the dissolution of Hoot Owl, Secretary of State records indicate.
The Bradleys could not be reached for comment.
A Tulsa doctor, Thomas Robert, purchased the property in 1994, telling the Tulsa World at the time that he and his family of five planned to use the land as a weekend retreat.
By 2000, the U.S. Census had reduced the population of Hoot Owl from five to zero.
Mayes County records indicate Roberts, who could not be reached for comment, has moved to West Virginia.
The Census Bureau’s latest set of population estimates released in June indicated HootOwl still had one resident as of July 1, 2009.
A Census Bureau official said small towns like Hoot Owl may be estimated to have at least one resident, even if the last enumeration recorded no residents.
“We don’t have specific information that informs us that there is exactly one person in this town, rather our estimates production programs are designed to allocate fractional shares of the county population to its component place parts, and in this instance, a fractional share is rounded to one person as our estimated total for the town,” said Rodger Johnson, chief of the Local Government Estimates and Migration Processing Branch, Population Division, in an e-mail.
The next official count of municipalities, currently under way, is scheduled to be released in 2011.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 07/12/2010