Cyril, OK

Cyril is a Caddo County town at the junction of US 277 and Oklahoma Highways 8 and 19, fourteen miles south of Anadarko and about halfway between Chickasha and Lawton. The townsite opened in 1907 on eighty acres from the allotment of Louise Lookingglass, the infant daughter of Bayard Lookingglass, a Comanche landholder. By April 1908, Cyril had nearly 200 residents, hardware and grocery stores, a restaurant, rooming house, pool hall, barber shops, blacksmith, lumberyard, feed yard, and feed mill. The Oklahoma City and Western Railroad, later a St. Louis–San Francisco branch, gave the new town a line into the wider region.

Cyril's economy changed when oil arrived. A refinery was built in 1918 to handle production from the nearby Cement Field, and the Anderson-Pritchard Refinery became the town's main employer from 1922 into the late 1970s. The Oklahoma Refinery Company kept the plant operating into the 1980s, but the facility was eventually abandoned and demolished in 2004. Cleanup followed the refinery's designation as a federal Superfund site. Agriculture still surrounds the town, with corn, hay, melons, cattle, hogs, and broomcorn part of its earlier farm economy. The 2020 census counted 827 residents, leaving Cyril with a compact street grid and a history shaped by land allotment, rail, oil, and US 277.