Cleora, OK

Cleora is a Delaware County census-designated place on State Highway 85, spread along the northwest side of Grand Lake o’ the Cherokees. The 2020 census counted 1,220 residents. Settlement began around 1890 in the Cherokee Nation of Indian Territory, and the post office opened in 1900; the community took its name from Cleora Ann Lunday, sister of postmaster Ed Lunday. The post office closed in 1954, but the name stayed attached to the roads, school, lakefront, and rural homes between Bernice, Afton, and Vinita.

Grand Lake changed Cleora’s geography. Pensacola Dam was built in the late 1930s and completed in 1940, turning the Grand River into a major regional lake for water, power, flood control, boating, and fishing. Cleora Public School gives the community a strong local institution; almost all of the CDP is in that district, and the school’s 130-acre outdoor classroom includes a nature trail, pavilion, pond deck, and rain garden. That combination makes Cleora easy to place: an old Indian Territory settlement on a highway, a small school community on the edge of Grand Lake, and one of those Oklahoma places where the dam changed the map without erasing the older name.