Avard, OK

Avard is a Woods County CDP and former incorporated town, seven miles south and six miles west of Alva at County Roads E0220 and N2370. Its post office opened on June 1, 1895, and the place took its name from postmistress Isabell Avard Todd. In 1904 the Avard Town Company incorporated the community as the Frisco built west from Enid to connect with the Santa Fe. The rail junction made Avard a shipping center for cattle and agricultural products, and farmers traveled as far as forty miles to sell broomcorn at Gerlach Mercantile's warehouse.

Avard prospered as an agricultural center and railroad transfer point until the mid-1930s, when the Depression, drought, dust storms, farm consolidation, and changes in national transportation weakened that economy. Tornadoes struck in 1943 and 1944, and the local school graduated its last class in 1968. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the community's one business establishment was a 300,000-bushel wheat elevator, a substation of the Alva Farmers' Co-Op Association. That elevator ties the present-day settlement to the agricultural trade that first made Avard a rail town.