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When I was a child growing up in Chandler, Oklahoma, my parents used to argue about which had the better people, Oak Grove or Agra. The former was the community where my father was raised, and the latter was my mother’s hometown. Writing now in the oddly advanced year of 2025, it's easy to say: since Oak Grove no longer exists after the old school building was torn down, Agra has won by default. The two communities were not evenly matched--Oak Grove was an unincorporated grouping of farms, while Agra was an organized town. In the period of my parents’ residence in those two places, Oak Grove probably had a population of about fifty (not counting children) living within a four mile radius of the school house, while Agra most likely had about four hundred. Yet, and as a writer I say this with sinking heart, both are matched in that category which constitutes a word-smith’s bread and meat--they had no violent crime. Yet, and as a writer I say this with sinking heart, both are matched in terms of sensationalism, a category which constitutes a word-smith’s bread and meat and that of journalists also. Here's the sad fact: neither Oak Grove nor Agra had any violent crime, which means no sensational stories, and that leaves me with little to say.
Oak Grove School House, 1927
Agra is the first town covered in the fifteen hundred and seventy two pages of the Lincoln County Oklahoma History, and it begins “The year was 1903, the year that the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas railway line completed that part of its road between Oklahoma City and Parsons Kansas. Wiki adds, An early real estate developer coined the town's name from the word "agriculture.” What followed the usual frenzy, the eagerest buying up of town lots to take place anywhere west of the Alleghenies.
County, Agra is situated on State Highway 18, fourteen miles north of Chandler, the county seat. A post office opened on December 20, 1902, and Isaac C. Pierce served as postmaster. Between 1902 and 1904 the Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma Railroad (later the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway) completed a line from Oklahoma City to Parsons, Kansas. Frank Wheeler and Sam Holder sold their farms to form the townsite along the railroad. Soon the American Land Loan and Trust Company sold lots. The townsite developer coined the town's name from the word agriculture. John Olmstead opened the first drug store, and Mark Crane owned the first general store. School classes were held in churches until the first schoolhouse was built in 1905. By 1918 the town supported the Commercial Hotel, the Bank of Agra, and a cotton gin. Early-day newspapers included the Agra News and the Queen City Times. During the 1920s drilling for oil and gas was accomplished nearby. By 1932 Agra boasted two cotton gins.
The population peaked in 1907 at 382 and reached a low of 258 in 1930 during the Great Depression, after which population remained steady through the twentieth century. The federal census reported 281 inhabitants in 1940, 302 in 1950, 265 in 1960, 335 in 1970, 354 in 1980, and 334 in 1990. In November 2001 a new school gymnasium replaced a 350-seat facility built in 1949. In 2000 the census counted 356 residents and in 2010, 339. Agra remained a "bedroom" community from which most residents commuted to work. In April 2020 the census reported 312 residents, which makes it by John Morris’s usual standard a ghost town (though Morris’s book was written in 1962 when Agra had a larger population).
Agra is served by the patient members of the resurrection waiting in Osage Cemetery one mile south and one mile west, a final resting place established in October 1893 shortly after the settlement of the Sac and Fox lands in September 1891. Oddly, okcemeteries.net shows three people who died in 1893, the year of the burying ground’s inauguration, and two of them small children. The most noteworthy of them is Bessie Pool, because hers was the first burial, dating from Oct.13th of that year, and soon to be accompanied two other siblings. Then several other small children deserve mention, all probably dying of membranous croup, a childhood disease that killed many of the pioneer families’ offspring. Among adults who died in the inaugural year were Delia Maddox and Edward Stuhlmacher. To say anything more about the dead in Osage Cemetery would cost me great labor, so I’ll just note that the worms have fed well.
After the Civil War, Walt Whitman compared the grass in the cemeteries to the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from ofispring taken soon out of their mothers' laps,
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
As the first thought of any community must be the health of its inhabitants, the first
businesses in town were a drugstore, opened by John Olmstead and a general store opened by Mark Crane. Otherwise, the initial buildings were houses and a few churches. The Bank of Agra, built in 1904, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Attempts to save the bank building failed due to its deterioration, and it was razed in August 1999. School was taught in churches until 1905, when the first school building was constructed. By 1918, the town had also added the Commercial Hotel and a cotton gin. Early newspapers published in Agra were the Agra News and the Queen City Times. The name is evocative but it was just hype designed to attract buyers to the town. Wiki says that both the nickname and the newspaper passed into oblivion many years ago, but somebody should write that encyclopedia a letter--hoping there’s a human being there to read it--stating that for lovers of history nothing passes into oblivion. History is a river and its study is the means by which we send our boats against the current, as Fitzgerald notes in The Great Gatsby:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further … And one fine morning. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Except for the green light visible From Gatsby’s mansion across the bay, the above information was taken from standard reference sources, which explains their soporific effect. Next I thought to turn to a trio of books--two of them standard in their day, if no longer--but neither contains a reference to Agra. To save the reader a futile trip to the library, I now mention both of these nullities. The first, for which I had high expectations, is The WPA Guide to 1930s Oklahoma, but even the great Oklahoma historian Angie Debo, who wrote the book, had nothing to say about Agra. Nor did the lesser author of the 1977 Oklahoma Handbook, published half a century ago by Oklahoma University Press. We are left then with the most popular encyclopedia of our digital day, Wikipedia, which if you want to go horseback and see the countryside is still a very useful steed and what’s more one that is politically neutral. I consult it daily as a review of things I used to know (but at the age of seventy-eight no longer can always recall). Also, given the smallness of Japanese houses, on retirement I had to get rid of the roomful of books I’d collected over a half-century of university teaching, and Wiki compensates for that loss as well.
What Wiki gives us is a well rounded and informative guide--complete with footnotes--to Agra and thousands of similar small towns in the U.S. and abroad. Though the details that I’ll cite can be learned in various other publications, Wiki provides the service of putting them all in one place where your cursor does the walking for you. Right off the Wiki article on Agra contains a jewel: “An early real estate developer coined the town's name from the word ‘agriculture.’” This illustrates for me the indispensable value of reading. I had spent the first fifteen years of my life within a ten-minute drive of Agra, but I never knew what the word meant.
It’s also useful to know that early residents called Agra the Queen City, no one knows just why except for the the usual chamber of commerce hoopla. In normal American speech, the Queen City was Cincinnati and her royal moniker reflected her noble position overlooking the great curve of the Ohio River. Now, if you go along with me in skipping the potted history, we’re done with Wiki. I had meant to look at the old newspapers and get the news, for yesteryear is news for us if we don’t know about it, such as the fact that Agra’s first newspaper was called the Queen City Times. Yes, of course everybody already knew that but they might not have known that copies of the paper are rare and unavailable on newspaper archives like newsapers.com, where I am accustomed to gather all my data.
Everyone knows that a story has to be sensational before it is considered news, and through the early history of rural America, it was killing that created for readers the greatest thrill. The news for today about Agra is that there is no news, and we all know that the no news is good news. A brief pause now to congratulate Agra!
Sources
Lincoln County Oklahoma History. Compiled and edited by the Lincoln County Historical Society. Lincoln County Oklahoma History. Chandler, OK: Country Lane Press, 1988.
Morris, John W. Ghost Towns of Oklahoma. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978.
Digital
https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=AG001. Consulted Aug 2025.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agra,_Oklahoma. Consulted Aug 2025.
https://genealogytrails.com/oka/lincoln/townofagra.html. Consulted Aug 2025.
https://www.okcemeteries.net/lincoln/osage/osage.htm. Consulted Aug 2025.
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