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Lawton is a city in and the county seat of Comanche County, Oklahoma, United States. It is the principal city of the Lawton, Oklahoma Metropolitan Statistical Area. Founded in 1901, Lawton lies in southwestern Oklahoma, near the Wichita Mountains. Lawton is the cultural and commercial center of the area. Lawton is home to large granite deposits as well as cotton fields. Fort Sill, Fort Sill Indian School, and Medicine Park are all nearby. The population was 92,757 at the 2000 census.

On August 6, 1901, the auction of town lots began, ending sixty days later. A tent city had grown up in anticipation of the auction, and banks, saloons, stores and other service industries sprang up overnight. Within one year, there were 100 saloons. Gambling was epidemic. In 1902 deputy US marshal, Heck Thomas, was sent to settle things down and was elected as Lawton's first chief of police, a position that he held for seven years until his health began to fail. Gambling remained legal until outlawed on Nov 16, 1907, coincident with the establishment of the State of Oklahoma.[5] Local legend through the years has noted that members of a Lawton church put a final end to gambling in the city by setting a gambling tent on fire.

The Rock Island Railroad expanded, rolling into Lawton on September 25, 1901, joined soon thereafter by the Frisco Line.[6] There was also a city streetcar line that ran through downtown Lawton and several residential areas until the 1940s. Following the advent of the automobile, highways were designated in all directions from Lawton initially including State highways 8 and 36 north and south (later U.S. 277 and 281), and State Highway 7 east and west (S.H. 7 still designated east of Lawton while same highway to the west of the city was co-designated U.S. 62 and S.H. 7 for many years but solely as U.S. 62 in recent years). S.H. 7 was entirely paved east of Lawton 24 miles to U.S. 81 at Lawton-Duncan "Y" north of Duncan by 1929, while U.S. 62 and 277 was paved north 7 miles through Fort Sill to near Medicine Park Y with S.H. 49 by 1930. By the late 1930s, Lawton was connected by completely paved highways to Oklahoma City via U.S. 62 and 277, U.S. 62 west to Altus on into the Texas Panhandle, and U.S. 277-281 south to Wichita Falls, Texas.

The influx and rapid population expansion led to a series of public health crises, water shortage, and lawlessness. The first city elections were held October 24, 1901, and Leslie Price Ross was elected mayor, with voting restricted to the few who had resided in the area for over a year.[7] One of the original two newspapers, the Lawton Daily Democrat, became the forerunner of the Lawton Constitution, which was established in 1911. In 1949, the Lawton Constitution acquired the Morning Press, and today the Constitution publishes only a morning edition that serves all of Southwest Oklahoma. Lawton's first radio station, KSWO-AM, signed on the air in 1941.

The First Presbyterian Church of Lawton, at 8th Street and D Avenue, was constructed in 1902, and remains the oldest public structure remaining in Lawton. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. On January 2, 1902, four public schools opened. The first class of six graduated in 1903 from Lawton High School. Cameron State Agricultural School (now Cameron University) convened on November 16, 1909, in the basement of the First National Bank at 302 C Avenue. In March 1911 classes were transferred to the current location on West Gore. The Mattie Beal-Payne mansion at Fifth and Summit was built in 1908, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The demographic makeup of Lawton at its founding reflected a mix of white settlers from states near and far, the indigenous Native Americans, who generally lived outside the town, but were highly visible, often in traditional clothing as they did business in town, and a smaller African-American population.

The United States entry into World War I accelerated growth at Fort Sill and Lawton. The availability of five million gallons of water from Lake Lawtonka, just north of Fort Sill, provided the impetus for the War Department to establish a major cantonment named Camp Doniphan, active until 1922.[8] The population doubled from about 8,800 to 17,600 as more than 50,000 soldiers passed though in training. By 1920, the city population declined again to 8,830.

In 1911 The School of Fire for the Field Artillery was opened at Fort Sill and it continues to operate today as the U.S. Army Field Artillery School.

From the stock market crash of October 1929, through the end of the 1930s, dust storms, severe winter weather, unemployment and poverty created severe economic challenges for Lawtonians. The decision at the end of 1930 to permanently locate the U.S. Army Field School at Ft Sill ended 20 years of indecision and kicked off a round of construction. Fort Sill commanders played a vital role in the implementation of Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration projects throughout the 1930s.[9] Some of the major projects included work on dams and buildings at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, the County Courthouse, Roosevelt Stadium (Now called Ron Stephens Stadium), the road to the summit of Mount Scott, and the Holy City of the Wichitas, among others.

Post-WWII Lawton

1946 - 1959
Following World War II, Lawton enjoyed rapid and steady population growth. From 1930 to 1940, population increased from 18,055 to 34,757, and by 1960, it reached 61,697. In the 1950s, significant public facilities were built, including the new Lawton High School (1954), Tomlinson Junior High School (1957), Comanche County Memorial Hospital (1951), several elementary schools, Lawton Municipal Airport (1955), McMahon Auditorium (1955), National Guard Armory (1955), and groundbreaking for the Museum of the Great Plains (1959). The decade also saw the opening of the Hotel Lawtonian in the downtown area in 1955, which was owned by the city for many years and now serves as a retirement residential community. And the city's growth in population and land area continued with new residential areas developing in the western, northwestern and southeastern portions of the city, reaching as far west as 52nd Street and east to 45th Street by 1959. Sears opened its first full-line department store in Lawton at the intersection of 11th and Gore in 1954 that included the main two-story store with escalator, along with separate buildings for the catalog department and automotive center. Today, Sears is located at Central Mall while its former site is still in use today by a local bank. Lawton's first modern shopping center, Erwin Acres, opened along North Sheridan Road just a few blocks south of Cache Road in 1953.

The City of Lawton was deeded land along the city's north side from Indian tribes in 1951 that was bounded by Cache Road to the north, Fort Sill Boulevard to the west, Ferris Avenue to the south and North 2nd Street to the east. That tract land measuring one mile by one-half mile, was annexed into city limits and used for the development of Elmer Thomas Park, several baseball and football fields, Lawton High School, National Guard Armory and later, the Museum of the Great Plains.

In 1955, the Oklahoma Department of Transportation dedicated the state's first three-level interchange just north of the downtown area at the junction of U.S. highways 62, 277 and 281, which was doubled in size and land area by 1963 with the construction of the Pioneer Expressway (Interstate 44) through the city, increasing the number of grade separation structures from the original two to five, including two large overpasses over a set of railroad tracks and a small residential area. The 1955 completion of the tri-level interchange also included the expansion of Cache Road (U.S. 62) into a four-lane divided highway for one mile west to Fort Sill Boulevard, where a grade separation overpass was built to better facilitate increased traffic congestion to and from Fort Sill's Gate 3, which was a mile to the north. The increased traffic congestion in the Lawton/Fort Sill area also led to improvements of U.S. 277 north of Lawton from the tri-level interchange into Fort Sill which was completed as the first segment of the four-lane Pioneer Expressway in 1959 that included interchanges with Fort Sill's Gate 2 near Henry Post Field and at Key Gate (the post's main gate). The expressway, in its initial design, included an at-grade intersection with Rogers Lane on the dividing line between Lawton and Fort Sill along with median crossings to serve various commercial and residential developments in the area. Until an interchange was built at the Rogers Lane intersection in the 1970s to bring the expressway up to full interstate standards, this location was for a time the only stoplight encountered by motorists over a continuous section of highway between Wichita Falls and Bangor, Maine.

Also during the 1950s, plans for improvements to Cache Road (U.S. 62) west of Fort Sill Boulevard were hobbled by opposition from merchants along that thoroughfare due to the amount of land needed to expand it into a four-lane roadway from the existing two-lane highway, which was bisected to the south by a residential frontage street called Sycamore Drive that was bordered by mostly residential development, and was to be wiped out by the Cache Road expansion (the north side of Cache was mostly commercial development including stores, restaurants, gasoline stations and a tourist strip with several motels). Even more opposition was mounted by merchants in the vicinity of the Cache Road/Sheridan Road intersection, which was originally to have been designed by federal mandate with an overpass and on/off ramps similar to the Cache/Fort Sill intersection, due to far more extensive commercial development in this area. Sheridan Road was a major north/south thoroughfare across what was then the west side of Lawton and also served as another Fort Sill entry through Gate 4. The issue was settled by the late 1950s when federal highway officials backed down on the overpass stipulation for the Cache/Sheridan intersection and Cache Road was widened from two to six lanes in the early 1960s from Fort Sill Boulevard west to a point east of Northwest 52nd Street, which was the starting point for a future new U.S. 62 alignment west of the city built a few years later.

Lawton's television station, KSWO-TV Channel 7, signed on the air in March, 1953 as an ABC affiliate almost simultaneous with the debut of two TV stations just across the Red River in Wichita Falls, Texas including KFDX-TV Channel 3 (NBC) and KWFT-TV (now KAUZ-TV) Channel 6 (CBS), which meant that Lawton and surrounding areas of Southwest Oklahoma and North Texas were among the few in the nation at that time to have access to three TV stations with full affiliations with their respective networks - the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex was the nearest TV market from Lawton and Wichita Falls to have a similar setup at the time.

Fort Sill continued to drive Lawton's economy during the 1950s due to the Korean War and the post's status as the U.S. Army's field artillery headquarters. Fort Sill nearly tripled in land area with the 1957 acquisition of former farm land across western Comanche County north of the cities of Cache and Indiahoma that reached to the southern border of the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. This move also affected a popular recreational/amusement area called Craterville Park north of Cache, which moved to a site near Quartz Mountain State Park north of Altus.

Lawton's tremendous growth during the late 1940s and 1950s led city leaders to seek out additional water sources to supplement existing water from Lake Lawtonka at the foot of Mount Scott near Medicine Park. In the late 1950s, the city purchases large parcels of land along East Cache Creek in northern Comanche County for the construction of a man-made lake with a dam built in 1959 on the creek just north of U.S. 277 west of Elgin. Lake Ellsworth, named for a former Lawton mayor and soft-drink bottler, was dedicated in the early 1960s and not only offered additional water resources, but also recreational opportunities and flood control along Cache Creek, which had been prone to flooding following heavy rains further downstream to the east of Lawton southward to near Walters in Cotton County.

Lawton in the 1960's

The 1960s saw the construction of Eisenhower (1962) and MacArthur (1969) high schools, Eisenhower Junior High School (1967) and several elementary school campuses; along with several shopping centers including Cache Road Square at 38th and Cache Road in 1961, which included two dome-topped stores resembling large "chrome domes"; several discount houses, a new location for Montgomery Ward at Sheridan and Gore (opened 1966) that replaced the older downtown store on D Avenue, relocations of several new-car dealerships and other retail businesses from the downtown area to new locations in other parts of the city, and several motor hotels franchised by national lodging chains and associations including Holiday Inn, Ramada Inn, Quality Inn, Best Western and others. Fort Sill also experienced tremendous growth during the 1960s, much of it due to the escalation of the Vietnam War later in the decade. In 1969, Fort Sill celebrated its centennial with various events and activities held during the calendar year.

The City of Lawton continued to grow considerably in land area as well as population. In 1966, the city annexed several miles of land on the city's east, northeast, west and northwest sections of Lawton to accommodate growing residential and commercial develop in those areas of the city. Prior to that time, aside from development along East Lee Boulevard to residential subdivisions around S.E. 45th Street, the eastern boundary of Lawton was generally in the vicinity of East Cache Creek, which runs north to south about 1 1/2 miles east of downtown Lawton and about 1/4 mile east of present-day Interstate 44. The western boundary of Lawton, which had been in the vicinity of 38th Street during most of the 1950s, moved west two miles to 67th Street by 1961 and in 1966, was a mile further west at 82nd Street.

In addition to construction of new school campuses during this decade, the Lawton Public Schools system made efforts to comply with federal mandates regarding desegregation of schools. Various schools located in predominately black neighborhoods including Douglass Junior-Senior High School and Dunbar Elementary School were closed with students in those neighborhoods transported by bus from their own neighborhoods to schools in other portions of the city. LPS also moved its general and administrative offices from the Central Junior High School campus (the original Lawton High School) to the Shoemaker Center site on Fort Sill Boulevard just north of the current Lawton High School.

Other developments during the 1960s included the renovation of the former Emerson School building into a new city hall, downtown post office and police station. Cameron University expanded its infrastructure by adding a new football stadium, library, Burch and Howell halls, the Shepler Center dormitories and administration building. The H.E. Bailey Turnpike was opened to traffic in 1964 and the entire 16-mile Pioneer Expressway was finished at the same time through the Lawton/Fort Sill area as the free section of Interstate 44 between the turnpike links north and south of Lawton to Oklahoma City and Wichita Falls, respectively. Several of the city's major thoroughfares also received major improvements during the decade including Cache Road, Gore Boulevard, Lee Boulevard and Sheridan Road. By 1969, major improvements were completed on other highways in the area including the four-laning of S.H. 7 east of Lawton, the relocation of U.S. 62 west of Lawton to a new four-lane highway which bypassed several towns on the old U.S. 62 alignment between Lawton and Altus, and improvements to S.H. 36 from Interstate 44 south of Lawton near Geronimo through Faxon and Chattanooga to the Frederick junction with S.H. 5 in Tillman County were completed in 1970.

Wayne Gilley served as Lawton's mayor for most of this decade, originally elected in 1961. Gilley served as Lawton's mayor until 1987 with the exception of a four-year period from 1971 to 1975 when Don Whitaker served as mayor.

The 1970s and beyond

During the 1970s, Lawton's downtown area was radically transformed due to urban renewal efforts. Those efforts led to the demolition of the greatest majority of buildings within the central business district including many buildings dating back to Lawton's early days in order to build an enclosed shopping mall - one of the few cities in the U.S. to virtually wipe out its downtown area for such development. These efforts followed the loss of many businesses beginning in the 1960s from the downtown area to shopping centers and other locations throughout the city, which left behind a lot of vacant buildings. Also spearheading urban renewal efforts in Lawton was a desire by many citizens to rid the downtown area of a string of bars, taverns, strip clubs that dominated blocks along C Avenue and 3rd Street. However, many such establishments simply relocated to other locations within the city limits, mostly along a section of Fort Sill Boulevard just south of Fort Sill's Gate 3 locally known as "The Strip."

Following the virtual demolition of most blocks of downtown Lawton by the mid-1970s, construction began on the new Central Mall, an enclosed shopping mall that included Sears, J.C. Penney and Dillard's as anchor stores along with many smaller retail shops, which opened in 1980. The downtown urban renewal project also made possible the construction of a new Lawton Public Library, which was completed in 1973; new facilities for the City National Bank completed in 1976 and a new downtown post office that opened in 1980.

That decade also saw the completion of a new Comanche County Courthouse in 1974, expansions of Cameron University, Comanche County Memorial Hospital and Southwestern Hospital, and the acquisition of land west of the city by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, which opened a large tire manufacturing plant in 1979 and soon became Lawton's second largest employer behind Fort Sill.

This decade also saw the Lawton Public School system build three new elementary schools, each of open-space design without separate classrooms and the district's first air-conditioned schools including Crosby Park, Carriage Hills and Almor West. The Great Plains Vo-Tech opened its doors on West Lee Boulevard in 1971.

Following the construction of Lake Ellsworth in the early 1960s, city leaders realized that even more water sources would be needed to keep up with Lawton's future needs. In the late 1970s following the construction of Waurika Lake in Cotton, Stephens and Jefferson counties about 40 miles southeast of Lawton on Beaver Creek, the city reached a deal to obtain Waurika Lake water and built a pipeline to transport the supplies between lakes Ellsworth and Waurika.

Lawton was hit by a tornado during the afternoon hours of April 10, 1979, which is locally known as "Terrible Tuesday". This tornado, which was part of that day's Red River Valley Tornado Outbreak, left 3 dead and more than 60 injured as it tore through the southeastern portion of the city around the vicinity of the intersection of 2nd and Lee Boulevard. Many businesses and residences were heavily damaged or destroyed by the funnel. That same tornado outbreak earlier resulted in 11 deaths, hundreds of injuries and millions of dollars of damage 75 miles to the southwest in Vernon, Texas. Less than two hours after Lawton tornado, an even more destructive tornado occurred 50 miles to the south in Wichita Falls, Texas that left 42 dead, thousands injured and considerably more damage to homes and businesses over a much larger area of that city.

www.wikipedia.com

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