Clearview, OK

Clearview was founded in 1903 as an all-Black town along the Fort Smith and Western Railroad, first organized through the Lincoln Townsite Company. J. A. Roper, Lemuel Jackson, and John Grayson laid out the town to attract Black settlers, and early Clearview supported a newspaper, stores, a sawmill, a hotel, a print shop, a brick school, and churches. The railroad and cotton-and-cattle economy later receded, and Clearview remains one of Oklahoma’s thirteen historically all-Black towns still in existence. Its present setting is a surviving townsite in Okfuskee County, reached through the farm roads southeast of Okemah.